Regular readers will know my love for student interim shows but this is the big time: These are the Final Shows.  This is when it gets serious; when our art graduates start feeling that nervous energy as the great and good of the UK art world see what wares they have produced over the past two years.

SHOW RCA opened this week at the Royal College of Art: Fine Art on Wednesday, Humanities and Design last night.  The new, large-scale studios that pepper the south side of Battersea Bridge house Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking and are absolutely consistent, the works of artists including tank.tv favourite Holly Antrum and Ed Fornieles are the standout pieces in Battersea among a strong showing.  In Kensington Gore, artists and designers from departments including Vehicle Design, Curating Contemporary Art, Innovation Design Engineering show works that have been developed in progress with some of the countries leading design firms and exhibit the potential of the future of industrial design.  Hundreds of young, emerging artists open themselves up for critique and judgment.  It doesn't disappoint.

SHOW RCA is at Royal College of Art until 03 July 2011.

Sketches for Regency Living is the exhibition of new work from artist Pablo Bronstein at the ICA, and is comprised of a series of interventions and performances developed from across the entire organisation.  For the first time, the ICA have given an artist free reign to create such a show and Bronstein has responded by introducing major architectural interventions and devising and choreographing performances that blur the boundaries between ballet and visual art.

The ICA building, incorporated as part of Nash House within Carlton House Terrace, is one of the most visited Regency-era buildings in London and Bronstein capitalises on this, using a broad range of visual artistic media to demonstrate how architecture and the built environment inform and influence social identity.  Bronstein works effortlessly between architecture, sculpture, drawing, installation and performance in order to draw out the culture of a space.

Visiting the exhibition you will come across faux neo-classical sculpture, daily choreographed performance, ballet and product design.  Bronstein's approach is experimental but fits within clearly defined parameters of outcome; precisely the intention for a venue appropriately named the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Sketches for Regency Living is at the ICA until 25 September 2011.

The folie of one of the nineteenth century's grand (petit) capitaines is the order of the day at the Courtauld Gallery, with an exhibition of work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of erstwhile muse Jane Avril.  Toulouse-Lautrec was the decadent dwarf whose painting, printmaking, art and craft was one of the defining voices of fin-de-siècle Paris.  His colourful, twirling, optimistic posters and paints gave the city an aesthetic that you still see in evidence today.  Jane Avril was the erotic, alluring and sensuous star of the Moulin Rouge, who under the design of the artist became the face of Paris' debauched underworld, embraced by dancers, cabaret stars, musicians and prostitutes.

Interestingly, the design that Toulouse-Lautrec graced upon Avril was not in the shape and mould of his most emblematic work and this is what this exhibition celebrates.  The paintings and prints on display here show signs of the corruption of Montmartre but are altogether sober, tender and very personal portraits.  For Toulouse-Lautrec, who came from one of France's noble families, Jane Avril was the undoubted star of the circuit, she who had been borne of a courtesan.  She, to him, was electrifying in every possible way.  She, to him, was someone who the crowds did not see but, here, we can see.  Art Nouveau (as I wrote about here) became the crest of Paris in the late nineteenth century and the critic Arsène Alexandre writing in 1893 stated how, between them, Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril alone have created the "true art of our time".

Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge is at the Courtauld Gallery until 18 September 2011.