Dream Girl by Maithili Chaturvedi is a solo exhibition of paintings reimagining iconic women from Hindi cinema as oil paintings on velvet. It is the inaugural showcase at Gallery Maxima.

We watch cinema evoked by a forlorn desire. For the beauty, allure, freedom, and ornament that compel a stirring so profound, it spills over from generation to generation. For the faces, bodies, and impulses that contour our perception of artistry, romance, and teasing, become inseparable from the shared lexicon of community. For the extraordinary conditions enlivened from our ordinary every day, we watch cinema to escape from the trite quotidian.

Maithili Chaturvedi’s debut solo show Dream Girl confronts and teases the separation between subject and spectator—and indeed: object and voyeur—by rendering memorable: The Heroine on velvet. The series draws its name from the titular song of the 1977 romantic drama Dream Girl, in which actress Hema Malini attempts to play five different characters, and indeed five different representations of womanhood, encompassing the unassailable task for femininity in Indian cinema.

In a narrative culture besotted by the stories of men, the Hindi film heroine is its most complex figure. Tasked with embodying film beauty: a fluid, temporal space of desire and expression, designed to both evoke the hero’s yearning and our awe, personify the poeticism of the movie’s spoken and lyrical text, and aestheticize the movie’s musical pursuits, the Heroine is at once the subject of gaze, the object of fantasy, and the body of dancerly ingenuity. She is eternal, both insisted upon and reviled, the apotheosis of immaculate appeal and a warning for young girls watching.

“I yearn for the infinitesimal moment on screen where the Woman to me is clarified, and I can paint her into the Dream Girl.”

Dream Girl is an attempt to arrest time and space, and redraw our attention to singular moments of beauty, emotion, and tension. The paintings here span bodies, expressions, and femininities, examine how cinema’s most indelible performers have outshined the written pen, and by extension the imagination of men, to draw images of possibilities for women watching. A pulsating Helen, a plaintive Meena Kumari, a wanting Parveen Babi, a defiant Madhubala, and a passionate Rekha are among the many resurrected and luxuriated on the surface of velvet.

“I love how the palette of my chosen fabric can yield an immense range of colour, as if limitations were like the alacrity of Rothko’s colour fields or the unnatural-naturalism of Eastmancolor cinema.” The medium here is the message: how velvet tantalizes a yearning of touch, but is also subject to judgements of gauche and inelegance. Much like the Hindi Film Heroine. The material’s distinctive sheen and collapsible depth shifts light into dark edges, while also betraying an undeniable sparkle. Again, much like the Hindi film heroine.

In this glorious debut showcase, Maithili Chaturvedi offers a love letter cloaked with concern: can our gaze and fascination set us free? Can a work of visual appeal have textual power? Can the ordinary me ever become a Dream Girl?

- Meher Manda

Meher Manda is a writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism, editor-at-large at Radix Publishing Cooperative, and Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Sicko Girl & Other Women is her debut short story collection, forthcoming with Penguin Random House in India and Feminist Press in the US in 2027. She is the co-author of A Town Like Every Other, a political graphic novel forthcoming with Hachette. Her criticism can be found at Foreign Policy, The Juggernaut, The Guardian, among others. Her poetry, fiction, and criticism have been published at The Los Angeles Review, The Margins, epiphany, Catapult, among other places.