THE MAC is back. One of Belfast's key arts factories has reopened its sliding doors after five long months of Covid-enforced closure.
The results are more than exciting - and not just because we've missed our cultural fix during lockdown.
Visits are staggered, there's a spectator limit inside of 100 and everywhere you go you are obliged to perform the coronavirus hand-sanitising ritual.
But it was beyond glorious to be in the beautiful interior with views of St Anne's Cathedral and the city centre.
There was a buzz inside as The MAC reopened last week. Businessman John Joe Muldoon was one of the first visitors.
"It's great, liberating. And of course, good to see people out and about, the economy opening up," he told me from his seat in one of the ground floor booths.
UnTurning, the exhibition on the top floor by Canadian artist Ambera Wellmann, occupies the gallery on the sixth floor.
It's her first in the UK and it's highly topical, capturing two of the societal reactions to the pandemic: anxiety and a certain friskiness.
Here, it's all about the beautifully painted flesh, a kind of 21st century Rubens. The massive canvas that faces you shows vast naked figures linking, complete with intimate body parts.
It's unsettling as the nudes merge on top of a vast navy oblong. This is apparently a reference to Gericault's 19th century work The Raft of the Medusa but I am not sure you would know until you read the art history blurb on the wall.
There are smaller personal moments in paintings such as Snugged. It's almost cosy, showing maybe a mother and child or two people hugging.
Elsewhere the fear factor surfaces. In Pussyfoot, at the back of the gallery, a naked figure on all fours disturbs against a pretty pink backdrop.
The face is skewed, the stance animal and slightly deformed, although not the full Chapman Brothers treatment.
Yet there are also some wonderful posteriors in the exhibition, notably in the painting of an erotic encounter, Pastoral.
This depicts partners, maybe same-sex, underlining what the artist describes as her rebuttal of "heteronomative" culture. Judge for yourself.
Now based in New York, Ms Wellmann's work is highly collectable, fetching up to £80,000 a canvas.
There is a different vibe one floor down in Turkish artist Maya Balcioglu's show.
Ambitious yet domestic, including artwork made from defaced tablecloths and rugs, this artist's pieces are untitled.
Some locate our anxiety, though, with internal organs referred to and one glorious piece with a couple of pretty ropes rising to meet each other, apparently inspired by tapeworms.
MAC senior curator Hugh Mulholland says Balcioglu is "an older artist whose work is just now getting the attention it deserves".
"It's good to see people back in the building as what we aim to do is share great art with our community," he says.
Completing the cultural cornucopia is a series of 8mm films by Dutch artist Jaap Pieters titled The Eye of Amsterdam.
He has performed the Warhol trick of observing life via the lens for a real-time period and his series of mini movies includes a section on Belfast boys, plus an arresting sequence featuring a collection of white crockery shaken by some sort of off-set earthquake at which the cups and saucers shake horribly, with one or two falling. Just like the Covid era, really.
The shows run at The MAC until August 8, themaclive.com
