Naked Ambition
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Regular price
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Attentive observers of the past ten years of British politics may not have heard of Kaya Mar, but chances are they will have seen one of his pictures - at a rally, or in an agency photograph syndicated around the world, or via a viral tweet. His paintings in oils are unlikely jewels of surreal satire, gleaming in the political desert in which we find ourselves: a kaleidoscopic gallery of the clowns, mountebanks and villains in charge, stripped of their self-importance and thrown overboard.
This selection of 100 pictures, edited and introduced by Sam Kinchin-Smith, tells several stories at the same time: of how we got into this mess, of how we might get out of it, and of how Mar has become one of our most perceptive and wildly inventive political artists. It is the first proper account of the work of a cult figure around Westminster, promoted by the present crises to the status of national treasure: a satirist laureate for Brexit Britain. And fortunately, considering what doubtless lies ahead, he's only just getting started.
Kaya Mar is a portrait painter and cartoonist. He lives and works in London. Sam Kinchin-Smith lives in London and works for the London Review of Books. Recent projects include an illustrated history of the LRB (Faber & Faber, 2019), which he compiled, and a monograph on Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (Routledge, 2018).