For artist Maithili Chaturvedi, one of the core childhood memories includes draping her mother’s dupatta around herself as a sari and then dancing to Hindi film numbers. She would prance around the room, imagining herself to be Chandramukhi from Devdas. Today that little girl has grown up into a 23-year-old fine arts graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, US, who is all set to pursue a masters’ degree at the Columbia University School of the Arts. However, what has endured over the years is her fascination with the ‘heroine’. “I catch snippets of her on the radio, or a fleeting fragment of her face on a weathered poster on the walls of a dilapidated Mumbai building; I embody her when I imitate Deepika Padukone’s character from Om Shanti Om, asking about the value of ‘ek chutki sindoor’,” says Chaturvedi.
Chaturvedi translates this fascination with the Hindi film nayika on canvas by giving the divas a dream-like, mysterious and glamorous look. And now 22 of those canvases will be showcased in her debut exhibition, aptly titled Dream Girl, at Mumbai’s youngest gallery, Maxima, founded by 28-year-old Sunaina Rajan. Both the show and the gallery open on 26 June. You immediately recognise the actors in the paintings—there is Madhubala from Mughal-eAzam, Zeenat Aman from Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Hema Malini from Dream Girl, and several other female protagonists from films released between 1950 and 1980. A diptych of Meena Kumari from Pakeezah attempts to capture her powerful gaze. And yet there is a unique kind of aura that Chaturvedi has imbued the works with—it’s almost as if she has layered the character’s arc with her own memories and interpretations.
Gallery Maxima is housed within a 1,550-sq-ft space in Kitab Mahal, a heritage building in Mumbai’s Fort area. With its high ceilings, pristine white walls and lots of natural light filtering in, the new art gallery becomes a warm and inviting space to exhibit Chaturvedi’s maximalist works. “Her concept has a lot of patterns and colours and yet everything works together in harmony,” says Rajan, an alumnus of The Art Institute of Chicago, who has played a crucial role in establishing Chemould Colab, a part gallery and part residency, in Mumbai. At Maxima, she hopes to focus on emerging and mid-level artists, especially painters, who hail both from the subcontinent and the diaspora. The idea is to showcase debut solos every six to eight weeks. “I’m drawn to painters, especially those who are doing new or different things with the medium. Chaturvedi, for instance, works with velvet,” adds Rajan.
Chaturvedi works with velvet for its tactility and allure. It beckons the viewer closer and yet [in the context of the gallery] remains out of bounds. “Kind of like the cinematic heroine, who is an object of intense visual and emotional intimacy but nevertheless remains fundamentally inaccessible,” she adds. Especially interesting is the Dream Girl portrait of Hema Malini, which makes sense even when flipped. “The movie shows her in so many different avatars— as a docile woman, a glamourous girl, and also a comic character, who dupes people to run her orphanage. I wanted to capture this multiplicity in a painting that could be looked at in different ways,” explains the artist.
Today when she rewatches the same films that she grew up with, Chaturvedi pays greater attention to the costumes, aesthetics and modes of femininity that the actors constructed back then. The show, in a way, also looks at how women have been imagined in visual culture over the years. In all the works, the women are in motion. They’re on stage or in courts dancing and performing. But the audiences too are not passive viewers. “Both the artist and the viewers are looking at the politics of spectatorship and spectacle. That is a really interesting way to look at Hindi cinema,” adds Rajan.
Dream Girl will be on view at Gallery Maxima, Mumbai, from 26 June to 1 August.
Riddhi Doshi is a Mumbai-based art, culture and travel writer.