KEY POINTS:
Let's celebrate. The week is made memorable by the work of three expatriate artists who have become prominent overseas although they work in astonishingly disparate styles.
At Artis Gallery in Parnell until April 29 there is a spectacular exhibition by Raymond Ching.
At the beginning of his career
when he was making his reputation with detailed pictures of birds, Ching always kept his hand in training by doing figure drawing. As his career developed, portraits and figures began to join the birds and his work gathered depth to go with the brilliance of his painterly draughtsmanship.
His work at Artis - a combination of birds and people - is as fine as he has ever done.
It is called Ark , although the references to Noah and the flood are oblique. These paintings are about the preservation of all living things and the spirit of this preservation is the collecting and guarding spirit of women.
Birds are everywhere in this show, all painted with a hypnotic skill in conveying the softness of feathers. In their colourful variety they represent natural life in all its forms. They make the human spirit take flight.
One of the most impressive paintings is The Return of the Dove to the Ark. The beautiful white birds, one bearing a twig of olive, have set the spirit of a young woman free and she extends her hands like wings over the darkness.
There are a number of these young women and they are accompanied by birds of every hue.
In Labels - where the birds all carry a label of the names humans have given them - one vivid red, cheeky parakeet is hitching a ride on the back of a woman in flight. And there is a great sense of gifting in the young woman who spreads her arms in Ark I as squawking gulls leave the refuge.
It is not all young women. One of the most touching of the paintings is Noah's Wife, where one of Ching's tenderly observed and wonderfully true middle-aged nudes lends her spirit to the work as stately birds establish new life.
Perhaps the only drawback is some dashes of paint to suggest a movement of a bird in flight, which seem unnecessary last thoughts on paintings that are complete without them.
The paintings with figures are the most appealing, but a word needs to be said for the charming Anzacs, where the tui accompanies the lyrebird and a dove against a sky that itself moves from dark clouds to bright light.
The women in the paintings fly because to fly is to see a panorama of the world and they fly with birds because birds are like souls in flight.
Because birds are enemies of serpents they fly in the light of the sun rather than hide in the darkness of the Earth.
The dark forces of the Earth are everywhere in the work of Francis Upritchard at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until April 28.
Her remarkably inventive work deals with gnomes and demons who, in the myths of many cultures, delve in the earth or hide in caves and who have wisdom and skills that are sometimes at odds with humans.
The show is called Bogagnome because there are also strong references to those bodies, sacrificial victims or outcasts, whose remains are perfectly preserved in the peat bogs of northern Europe and in the modern world are displayed in museums.
The most remarkable figure in a remarkable show is a piece called D.D.B.
This dwarf figure is set back in time by having a Medieval cap of the sort that can be seen in paintings as late as those of Breugel, and with slip-slop shoes of a very simple kind.
The face of the figure is an extraordinary piece of characterisation.
The eyes are closed, just as in the bodies from the peat bog, but the hooknose and the cynical mouth suggest knowing and the insight of the Fool in King Lear.
What is magical about this figure is the gesture of the hands. A finger on the left hand is raised in admonition, and the right hand encloses something invisible, all made terribly real by the exactness of the modelling of the fingernails.
The characterisation of faces is a splendid development of Upritchard's work. Faces are buried in vessels of clay suspended from the ceiling, or as demons caught in leather bags.
They also give twisted tension to the heads of small bronze figures making ritual gestures with their long fingers or streaked with the marks of sacrifice. These figures are bizarre but embody history, myth and workings of the dark perverse spirit.
Bill Culbert's show at the Sue Crockford Gallery until April 28 is all light. His speciality is fluorescent tubes, although he can make a stack of glass jars in the sun as monumental and precarious as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Culbert has a habit of thrusting his lights through things. Here they transfix very ordinary tables of Formica to show that light bursts in on the most commonplace of things.
One delightful work is a fluorescent tube emerging from a suitcase.
It is something Culbert did years ago, when the tubes went through old suitcases.
In this piece, called Slate Samsonite, the suitcase is smarter and suggests a brittle world from which light can emerge heading steadily upwards.
It's not all fluorescent tubes in this bright but astringent show from Culbert.
There are two delightful 100m spirals of cable that end in the revelation that is a 60-watt bulb.
Culbert has been at it a long time but his games with light are an untiringly fresh dance.
These New Zealand artists deserve the reputation they have gained in a wider world.
