Marcel Duchamp marked a historical rupture when he spoke of wanting to make works that are not “of art”; on the other hand, artists have always produced (or can I say “by-produced”?) art that does not quite amount to works. Painters used to call such things sketches, and rigorously distinguished them from finished works. For example, the ravishing plein air oil sketches that Corot produced in Italy in the 1830s, now so highly valued in part because they seem to point the way to Impressionism and beyond, would never have been exhibited or openly sold in the artist’s lifetime, even if they circulated

The first gallery in Bloomberg Space, little more than a lobby, is a singularly unsuitable place for the display of art. With its shiny black floor and track lighting, it is coolly corporate in feel. Its irregular, small area is overwhelmed by a double-height ceiling and a corner of floor-to-ceiling glass. A footpath cuts diagonally through the tiny space, with its one oddly oblique wall, making it uncomfortable to stop and actually look at the artworks forced into its corners.

Into this unwelcoming place, Ian Kiaer has heroically installed his understated art. A painter by training and disposition,