Lot 097
Kartika Affandi
b. Indonesia, 1934
Mother And Child, 1970
signed and dated
‘Kartika 1970’ (lower right)
oil on canvas
98 x 78cm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Selangor
ESTIMATE RM 20,000 – 35,000
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The Mother-and-Child theme is one of the most predominant in art. Being a figurative artist like her world-renowed iconic father, Affandi (1907-1990), Kartika paints penetrating portraits including those of her father, ordinary and marginalised people and menial workers. Her oil-impasto style resembles that of her father, to whom she was apprenticed since the age of 7. Like her father too, she abandoned the paintbrush, preferring to use her bare hands. She was married twice and twice divorced, to artist R.M. Saptohoedojo (at the age of 17, arranged marriage) and Austrian Gerhard Koberl. She became a feminist icon when she filed a divorce against Saptohoedojo, with whom she had eight children. Her son, Didit, also paints, as did her mother Maryati, who was Affandi’s first wife. Rukmini, Affandi’s daughter from his second marriage to Rubiyem, also paints. By 1970, Kartika was fairly well-developed as an artist, having had her first solo in Jakarta in 1969 and helping Affandi complete a mural in the East-West Centre in Hawaii in 1967. In 1971, she had a solo at the Samat Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. She fought against male chauvinism to become an artist in her own right. Her father had famously told her: “It is a shame 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.”
Artist-trained conservationist Kartika Affandi is the subject of a documentary, Kartika Affandi: 9 Ways of Seeing, by Christopher Basile. Since 1977, she has been the curator of the Affandi Museum. She had a stint at the Tagore University in Shantineketan, India, and took up Sculpture at the Polytechnic School of Art in London (1952). She studied mechanical preservation and restoration of art objects at the Austrian Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1980), and also the International Centre of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property in Rome (1984). She also set up a women’s art museum in Yogyakarta. |
