Kartika Affandi-Koberl (born 27 November 1934), is an Indonesian artist born into a family of artists. The only child of artists Affandi and Maryati. Kartika in 1952 married R.M. Saptohoedojo, a painter. She has eight children. Kartika’s relationship with her husband was strained by his polygamy and also his stinginess with the paint they shared, and they divorced in 1972. In 1985, she married Austrian Gerhard Koberl, a yoga and meditation teacher. They separated in 1994 and divorced in 2001.

From the age of seven, Kartika was instructed by Affandi in how to paint with fingers and tubes directly on the canvas. Any mixing of colours is done on her hands and wrists. Kartika has no permanent studio; like Affandi, she prefers to paint outside in the village environment where she interacts directly with her subjects and on-lookers. This contrasts with most contemporary Indonesian painters, who work in their studios from mind-images, memory, photographs or sketches.

Born in 1930s, when men still dominated the art world, Kartika is among a small group of women painters who from the mid-1980s succeeded in exhibiting their work on a regular basis and in gaining limited critical recognition. Even in this context, Kartika’s art has been described as unique, ranging from conventional to subversive.

In a culture where the individual self rarely is put to the fore, Kartika had made the self-portrait one of her main themes. In a society where emotion is suppressed, both publicly and privately, Kartika fills her canvases with intense feeling. In a culture where genitals are considered taboo in representation, Kartika has painted her own nudity graphically and without the prescribed, distancing sweetness, never depicting the body as an object of pleasure, whether that of others or her own.

Given their close bond, Kartika painted penetrating portraits of her father, right through to his final years of debilitating illness. Another provocative portrait, Hindu Priest, shows an old man, close up, as he walks on a beach. His face is preoccupied, intense – a face that might have been taken from an Ingmar Bergman movie. There is nothing here of the glamour, romance or mystical aura that so often characterises images from Bali such as in O.H. Supono’s Balinese Priest.