Sunaina Rajan Opens Gallery Maxima Art Space at Kitab Mahal in Fort
Founder Sunaina Rajan has opened Gallery Maxima, a new 1,600-square-foot contemporary art gallery located at Kitab Mahal in the Fort neighborhood of Mumbai. The new cultural venue aims to provide a platform for emerging contemporary artists by combining Rajan’s curatorial experience and art business expertise.
The 28-year-old founder established the gallery to bridge the gap between artistic curation and the commercial art market. Rajan previously co-founded Chemould CoLab at Chemould Prescott Road, where she helped launch the careers of artists like Gurjeet Singh, Kuldeep Singh, Anirudh Shaktawat, Rithika Pandey, Shailee Mehta, and Pallavi Sen. She also worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Levy Gorvy Dayan, the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru, and Nature Morte, where she spent two years focusing on art sales, acquisitions, and building collections.
Rajan chose the space at Kitab Mahal after searching for a venue that avoided the traditional white-cube gallery aesthetic. The 1,600-square-foot space features 14.5-foot ceilings, soaring arches, a single rectangular hall, and foldable red doors. The design preserves the original beige stone flooring, updated with a grid of black granite, and features carefully selected furniture pieces like a mustard-yellow coffee table and a green Chandigarh chair.
The gallery's inaugural exhibition, titled Dream Girl, showcases the work of Mumbai-born artist Maithili Chaturvedi. The exhibition features oil paintings on velvet depicting iconic Hindi film heroines, including Hema Malini, Rekha, Madhubala, Helen, Zeenat Aman, Parveen Babi, and Dimple Kapadia. The works explore how these women were historically constructed through the male gaze, reclaiming the imagery through a female perspective.
According to Rajan, her curatorial process involves assessing the longevity of an artist's practice. She evaluates whether an artist's work is archival, how they handle preservation, storage, and transport, and whether they use custom canvases and mix their own pigments.
Dream Girl is currently on view on the second floor of Kitab Mahal in Fort. The exhibition will run until August 1, with visiting hours scheduled from Tuesday to Saturday, between 10:30 am and 6:30 pm.
