Oh, we love this time of year...always have done.  Sure it might be cold, but it's bright and sunny and for the first time this year our art school kids are dusting off their trendiest jackets, cleaning their specs and being pushed out into the limelight by their tutors.  That's right - it's Interim Show time!  And if you want fine arts, go to Slade.  If you want innovation in design, go to the Royal College.  If you want photography, well actually you're in luck.

Opened this week, and on until Friday, London College of Communication host in their Upper Street Gallery the interim MA Photography.  For those in the know, this is the space for eminent photographers-in-training.

And what do you get for your (hypothetical) money?  The funniest, smartest and most eclectic experimental photography currently on show in London.  There's much which jumps off the walls and straight into your face but a lot more talent besides.  Take the triptych of portraits by exhibiting artist Lee Milne, for example.  These gentle black and white pictures of imagined and fabricated industrial machines show perfectly both the delicate skill and technique required by an artist to participate on the highest level as well as the gentle affection a photographer must have for his or her sitter.  These homemade, man-sized, mechanized contraptions are, essentially, useless - and that is their tragedy, but they are here represented as tender remainders of the technocratic revolution.  Really wonderful stuff.

MA Photography Interim Exhibition is at London College of Communications until Friday 11 February, 2011.

Because, for the second time in a year, Mat Collishaw has taken the taken a complex concept and distilled it to its most breathtakingly beautiful essence.  Earlier this year he constructed a facade, punctuated with windows upon which rapturous images of wild animals and exotic fauna were rear-projected (bear with me, it looked better than it sounds).  Exhibited at the BFI, the Young British Artist and former paramour of Tracey Emin, has moved onto one of the other great British institutions.

Magic Lantern is a zoetrope of momentous scale.  You know a zoetrope; a succession of images animate at the turn of a wheel with peephole slats.  Collishaw's though is of grand scope at the museum's highest point.  Luminescent to the point of heart-rending beauty, the work comes alive at dusk each evening, with hand-crafted fluttering moths shining like a beacon into the night.

I have stated in print before that I would find it nearly impossible to fall in love with, or to, a Mat Collishaw piece but I will, now, happily recant.  Like an artist with secure in his ability he is experimenting in form and concept.  A site-specific work, this piece is quite possibly the finest single new artwork that you will see this year.  A return to Gothic Romanticism, in one of my favourite places in the world.  Spend your day sitting in awe of the Raphael Cartoons on the ground floor and exit the museum at night with this in your wake, then be prepared to hand your soul over to magnificent, exquisite grace.  Up against the seasonal snow that we are having this winter, we've no defence...Simply resplendent.

Magic Lantern by Mat Collishaw will be visible in the V&A Cupola (from dusk) and the John Madejski Garden (between 10.00 - 17.45) until 27 March 2011.

images: Lantern Moth; Moth; Lantern; all Mat Collishaw.  Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum.

Because London is that bit much more à la mode when Urs is in town.

This major exhibition of new sculptures is an extension of a series of works that was shown at The New Museum, New York in 2009 under the title Marguerite de Ponty, a play on the works of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (the pseudonym of Étienne Mallarmé, who also went under the name de Ponty) and a French phrase indicating the practice of serving all the dishes of a meal at once - I guess if you wanted to describe this show in one word, it would be 'playful'.

The pieces in this new exhibition work in a chronological art historical order of significance.  Service à la française, the most ambitious of Fischer's works to date is a blindingly immersive work made from over 25,000 photographs and over twelve tons of steel.  Imposed upon more than fifty chrome monolithic boxes Fischer has silkscreened a series of images of everyday items.  The result is an optical illusion, a trompe-l'œil imago mundi, the city borne of a cosmic chaos before your very eyes.

The title, Douglas Sirk, is an homage to the Hollywood director who, after decades of being overlooked as a run-of-the-mill maker of melodramatic features was posthumously re-appraised as a master of irony.  Fischer takes innate irony as his point of genesis and what we are left with is a world of mirrors, screens and windows in which both the characters of the exhibition and the audiences themselves are reflected, framed and divided.

This is the inaugural exhibition of the new Sadie Coles HQ gallery in London's Piccadilly.  Bravely, they have taken the decision to show an artist who, purposefully, does not make the gallery his own.  The space floats, moves, is peripatetic.  They just had close Fischer, along with Rebecca Warren, curating a show of the late yBa Angus Fairhurst at their original Audley Street gallery.  This is a gallery that knows exactly what they are doing.

Douglas Sirk by Urs Fischer is showing at Sadie Coles HQ, 4 New Burlington Place, London W1S 2HS until 11 December.

all photos: Stegan Altenburger; copyright Urs Fischer; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London