Baa’s Gold (Family portrait) (2021)

Hetain Patel aims to challenge assumptions about how we look and where we come from. As a child and teenager, he was greatly inspired by comic book heroes. This painting comes from a body of work that grew out of a robbery that his grandmother (called Baa, which means ‘mother’ in Gujarati) suffered in 2015, during which her gold jewellery was forced from her wrists. Patel’s deeply personal paintings ‘seek to retrieve Baa’s gold’, which for the artist is a metaphor for everything that has been taken from his family via the systemic racism experienced in the UK since his birth and before.

'Very early in my career I presented a performance piece at the Harris Museum. Years later, it is incredibly meaningful to me to have my new work in the collection here – to have a painting of my family permanently housed so close to where I grew up, knowing that my family living in the region can visit to see it themselves on the walls, among a rich history of art.’ Hetain Patel, Artist (2021)

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