Mehak Garg transforms domestic spaces into charged landscapes of memory in her first Mumbai solo show

Mumbai has a particular talent for making intimacy feel spatial. A crowded room can still contain private worlds, while a familiar corner can suddenly feel estranged. In In the Quiet Between, Mehak Garg’s first solo exhibition in Mumbai, the room becomes a place where those contradictions gather.

How scale, memory and urban solitude shape the evocative art of Mehak Garg

At Gallery Maxima in Fort, Garg presents large-scale oil paintings alongside works on paper, moving from five-inch compositions to a sixteen-foot canvas. Her interiors are recognisable without belonging entirely to any one place. A doorway, a window, a patch of light or a domestic object seems to have arrived carrying its own history.

Garg is especially interested in what happens between people. Her figures may occupy the same room while appearing absorbed in separate emotional lives. “I am interested in those quiet distances,” she says, referring to the space between two people, a body and a doorway, or a person and the room around them.

In When the Light Finds Her, a small figure sits within a much larger room alongside a cat, birds and falling light. The proportions suggest loneliness or withdrawal, yet the room remains animated. Air, light and objects seem to participate in the scene, giving the painting the uneasy feeling of a memory that has acquired a life of its own.

That relationship with memory sits at the centre of Garg’s practice. Her interiors begin with lived experience, but they are subsequently altered by recollection. “Memory is never completely fixed; it edits, removes, exaggerates, and sometimes even invents,” she says. The resulting spaces hover somewhere between remembered and imagined, carrying emotional associations that may have little to do with their original appearance.

For Sunaina Rajan, curator and founder of Gallery Maxima, this is where Garg’s paintings gain their particular force. “A room can hold the residue of a relationship, a conversation, an absence or a particular period of our lives,” she says.

Scale further complicates that emotional geography. Garg describes smaller works as holding a thought in condensed form, while a large painting can require the viewer to move through it almost as though entering a room. Yet size alone does not dictate intimacy.

At Kitab Mahal, these paintings ask for time without prescribing what the viewer should feel. Their rooms contain companionship, estrangement, memory and solitude in varying proportions. The people inside them may remain still, but the spaces around them keep changing.

What: In the Quiet Between by Mehak Garg

Where: Gallery Maxima, D. Sukhadwala Road, Fort Mumbai

When: August 13 – September 26

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