Mumbai's Newest Gallery at its Oldest Address: Gallery Maxima

Mumbai’s Fort has always kept its own time: Gothic spires and Deco facades standing shoulder to shoulder in the hum of a city that built its intellectual life here, and now, in a second-floor inside Kitab Mahal, it makes space for Mumbai’s newest art gallery, Gallery Maxima. Sunaina Rajan, its founder and curator, has spent a career learning galleries from the inside and arrives with a clear instinct: championing South Asian art and taking risks. Her opening bet is Maithili Chaturvedi, twenty-three, who paints Hindi cinema's most iconic heroines as oil on velvet, until nostalgia gives way to more complex questions. I caught up with Sunaina as her first chapter begins.

A Life in Art
Growing up in Mumbai, Sunaina was drawn to drawing and painting from the age of four. That early interest took her to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later to Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York, where she worked with Post-War and Contemporary Art. Back in India, she co-founded Chemould CoLab before continuing her journey at Nature Morte and other leading art institutions, working across curatorial strategy, programming and artist development.

Working behind the scenes of exhibitions gave Sunaina a front-row seat to everything that happens before a show opens and long after it closes. ‘When you're working with artists at a formative stage of their careers, you're helping establish the foundation upon which the next decade of their practice will be built. Decisions made at this point, including how the work is contextualised, priced, documented, and circulated, will have long-term implications. It helped me understand the process of shaping a cohesive exhibition. A show shouldn't feel like a collection of available works pulled from inventory; it should articulate a cohesive body of work, whether through theme, research,  material exploration, and so on. The exhibition should strengthen the practice rather than simply display it.’

That way of thinking now forms the backbone of Gallery Maxima. Sunaina is especially interested in artists at moments of change, whether emerging voices finding their footing or mid-career practitioners ready to break away from what is familiar. ‘Remaining visible is important, but remaining fresh is far more difficult.’

The Maxima Vision
The Gallery Maxima Vision is centred around emerging and mid-career South Asian artists, both from India and the diaspora, whose practices engage with questions of material, memory, identity, landscape and lived experience. ‘At Gallery Maxima, I am focused on championing painting and supporting artists whose practices demonstrate rigor and feel genuinely fresh. I want to stay with them for the long haul and nurture their careers’ says Sunaina.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Dream Girl, becomes an early reflection of her philosophy. Featuring the work of Mumbai-based artist Maithili Chaturvedi, the exhibition transforms some of Hindi cinema’s most recognisable female figures like Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Helen and Parveen Babi into luminous oil on velvet. For Sunaina, Maithili’s art offered the perfect introduction to the gallery because it demonstrated how contemporary art can begin with familiarity and lead audiences towards more complex questions. Maithili’s portraits move quickly beyond nostalgia and examine how heroines have been made into symbols of beauty, desire, glamour and fantasy, while reclaiming these images through the agency of painting.
 

The Iconic Kitab Mahal
Fort carries the memory of Mumbai in its Victorian walls and Art Deco buildings. Housed within its iconic 1890 Kitab Mahal, Gallery Maxima has retained the original arched doorways, curved windows and fifteen-foot ceilings to become part of the gallery experience. For Sunaina, the architectural appeal lay in this very tension of the old and the new. Before Gallery Maxima found its home in Kitab Mahal, she spent time looking across Mumbai’s art districts to find a space that could take part in Mumbai’s cultural life. Being surrounded by other galleries, historic buildings and the everyday rhythms of South Mumbai was an important part of that vision, which Kitab Mahal, then, lent its ‘gorgeous heritage’ to.

Sunaina tells us, ‘Iram Boxwala, who designed the space, says, "The building had already written the first chapter.  Our job was simply to continue the story, not rewrite it. This idea guided every design conversation. We never saw Kitab Mahal as a blank canvas, but as a building with so much character that deserved to be celebrated, not replaced. The goal was to create a gallery that  feels warm, expressive and welcoming, while letting Kitab Mahal's heritage remain the heart of  the experience.’

The Road Ahead
‘The South Asian and especially the Indian gallery ecosystem is currently in a remarkable period of growth and excitement. We're seeing strong gallery programmes, exceptional Government art colleges producing talented young practitioners, increasing international visibility and a collector base that is rapidly expanding.’ For Sunaina, this growing curiosity is one of the most exciting parts of the current moment. Events like Art Mumbai, Gallery Weekend and Art Night Thursday have helped open up Mumbai’s art spaces, making galleries feel less intimidating. Gallery Maxima hopes to be part of this ongoing conversation, creating a space where artists can take risks and audiences can discover new ways of seeing. The gallery’s upcoming programme will move beyond painting and into photography, textiles, ceramics, paper and new media, with a focus on solo exhibitions that allow each artist’s practice to unfold fully.
 
With shows planned until February 2028, Sunaina is thinking beyond individual exhibitions. She hopes to build a gallery that grows alongside its artists and visitors. For her, the measure of success is simple: that someone walks out of Gallery Maxima seeing contemporary art a little differently, more curious, more open and more willing to explore what it can become.

Dream Girl is on view till 1st August 2026. 

Words Nidhi Soni
Date 15.7.2026