Ibu Kartika Affandi paints just like her famous father, Affandi (1907-1990). She was always beside her father when he painted, giving him the right coloured tubes when he asked for it. She knew every pressed-tube action directly on canvas, every finger pressure, every stroke and emotion when her father painted. Her mother, Maryati, Affandi’s first wife, was also an artist. She was already playing with paint since the age of 7. But she has her own mind as an artist, and is not averse to taboo or conservatism, despite a woman artist not being a common and popularly accepted thing in patriarchal Indonesia then when she started exhibiting in 1957. Affandi had told her: “It is a shame that you were born a female and my daughter, because as a woman you will never be able to be accepted as an artist in this country. And if somehow you are, then you will always be cursed as my offspring to live in my shadow.” (extract from the writings of Prof. Astri Wright, who authored the seminal, Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, OUP, 1994). Kartika has been curator of the Affandi Museum since 1977. She has good foundations in art albeit informal. She studied the mechanical preservation and restoration of art objects in the Austrian Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1980), and also the International Centre of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property in Rome, Italy (1984). She had a stint at the University of Tagore, Shantineketan, India (1950); and sculpting from the Politechnic School of Art in London (1952). She has taken part in solo exhibitions all over America, Asia, Australia, Algeria since her first in Jakarta in 1969. She took part in an exhibition at the Samat Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur in 1971. She was first married to artist Saptohoedojo and then an Austrian, Koberl, both of whom she had since divorced.