Delhi-based artist couple share how they navigate individuality while working together

DAG’s Shared Lives, Distinct Voices invites viewers to notice how similar lives does not dilute your individuality

Take a slow stroll through Shared Lives, Distinct Visions at DAG (formerly known as Delhi Art Gallery), and a certain quiet settles in. Art is often thought of as a solitary craft. This exhibit turns the concept of an artist on its head. What happens when two creatives get together? Does one's work affect their partner's? Or do your styles start to differ even more?

Take a walk at DAG, at The Taj Palace in Colaba, and you'll know the answer. The exhibit, consisting of 13 couples including the likes of Madhvi and Manu Parekh, Mona and Amitava Rai, and many more, asks viewers to notice how lives lived in closeness can shape art without collapsing into sameness.

Mona Rai's Mangolpuri

Married since 1985 and practising art for over four decades, the Delhi-based couple shares a life deeply rooted in art, yet defined by difference. Their pairing embodies the exhibition's central idea that companionship can sharpen, rather than soften, individual vision. At Shared Lives, Distinct Visions, they portray their own identity despite sharing entire lives together, how they refuse to become a unit and lose their own personalities. "As far as the art is concerned, it is an independent entity," Amitava says, "It has nothing to do with relationships. But there are certain ideas, certain sensibilities [we share] and it helps to create art."

Amitava's Sky, Earth, Sea, Figure

Mona echoes this balance between guidance and autonomy. Having known Amitava even before their marriage, she acknowledges his influence, particularly as a self-taught artist. "He did guide me a lot. And it helped me," she says, before adding, "At the end of the day it is your language, your expression of what you see or what you experience in life."

Their works make this distinction visible. Amitava's practice - spanning oil, pastel, paper, and collage - leans toward darker tonalities and philosophical reflection. In Amitava's Sky, Earth, Sea, Figure, one can see the darker, more moody emotions at play with the colours and a structure present as opposed to Mona Rai's Mangolpuri, where the canvas is a chaos, creating a riot of brighter colours and textures.

Amitava Rai and Mona Rai

"In mine, dark colours are there," he notes, adding that once a work is finished he becomes "the viewer, not the artist". Mona's abstractions, by contrast, are playful: burnt, stitched, layered with gold and silver foil. "I'm a more playful person, apparently," she says, "He's very serious and very inward. I am an outward person." Where Amitava's inward sensibilities can be seen in the boxed structures of Sky, Earth, Sea, Figure, Mona's work thrives in the disarray.

On display at DAG till January 3, 2026, Shared Lives, Distinct Visions reveals how a shared life can deepen artistic clarity not by erasing difference, but by allowing it to resonate.