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Looking for another gallery to add to your rotation, Mumbai? Here's one for the list.
While wandering around the CSMT station area, step into Kitab Mahal – built in the 1890s – where Gallery Maxima has just opened its doors. The space spans 1,600 square feet, giving artists room to exhibit large-scale work. White walls, stone flooring, curved glass windows and bright red bi-fold panel doors strike a balance between the building's Art Deco bones and a distinctly modern sensibility.
Established by Sunaina Rajan, who previously co-founded Chemould CoLab, the gallery supports young and mid-career South Asian artists working across sculpture, painting, textiles, craft and new media. Translation: they’re not sticking to the usual roster of established names. The mandate is simple. Champion artists and build meaningful connections between them and the audience, all while digging into contemporary South Asian art.
Dream Girl debuts
Gallery Maxima has kicked off with a solo show, Dream Girl, by Mumbai-New York-based painter Maithili Chaturvedi. Through richly textured oil paintings on velvet, a material long associated with glamour and sensuality, the artist pays homage to Hindi cinema's iconic heroines. The series takes its name from Hema Malini's 1977 film Dream Girl, in which the actress plays five different characters.
From resurrecting screen legends like Meena Kumari and Madhubala to Zeenat Aman, Helen and Rekha of the '70s and '80s, the works are not, strictly speaking, nostalgic reproductions of gorgeous women. They invite viewers to explore femininity, spectatorship and the mythology built around Bollywood's golden age, and push them to consider how these actresses outshone the male gaze that so often framed them.
What else to expect?
Gallery Maxima, interestingly, plans to spotlight solo artists – giving viewers room to sit with one story at a time – rather than group exhibitions. By the end of the Dream Girl run, the space will screen one of the films referenced in the paintings, so cinephiles get something out of this too.
When: Tues-Sat, 10:30am-6:30pm. Dream Girl runs at the gallery until August 1.
Where: Gallery Maxima, 2nd Floor, Kitab Mahal, D Sukhadwala Rd, Azad Maidan, Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001
How to get there: The closest metro stations to Gallery Maxima are CST (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) on the Central Line and Churchgate on the Western Line. From either station, the gallery is just a short 5–10 minute taxi ride or a 15-minute walk.