'Marginal Benefit' marks Johannes Ulrich Kubiak’s third solo exhibition at Eva Steynen Gallery and opens during Antwerp Art Weekend 2026. The show presents a new body of large paintings on canvas and smaller works on paper, in which forms and structures gradually unfold through colour, rhythm, and attentive temporality.
Each work begins with an underdrawing that establishes a rhythmic framework, within which subtle patterns and spatial relationships emerge. As the painting develops, this linear scaffolding slowly recedes beneath successive layers of translucent red, yellow, and blue pigment. Kubiak’s brushstrokes — fine, precise, and cumulative — function as drawing tools, generating chromatic fields that oscillate between line, structure, and atmosphere.
The paintings operate through restraint: motifs appear and dissolve without resolving into figurative imagery, leaving forms in flux. Depth, rhythm, and tonal modulation reward prolonged attention, situating the viewer in a contemplative, process-based encounter.
Kubiak’s practice aligns with traditions of layered colour construction and glazing, connecting early techniques with modern abstraction, while foregrounding the conditions of seeing rather than the production of fixed representation. In the subtle oscillation between emergence and disappearance, his work affirms painting as a space of sustained reflection.
Johannes Ulrich Kubiak (b. 1961, D) lives and works in Antwerp; his works have been presented in numerous exhibitions across Europe and are held in public and private collections.
Image: Johannes Ulrich Kubiak, habit, 2025, pigments, tempera, acrylic on canvas, 135 x 100 cm