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, unfolding through colour, rhythm, and attentive perception.. The title alludes to the incremental nature of his practice, where meaning and perception emerge through accumulation rather than declaration.
Each work begins with an intuitive underdrawing that establishes a rhythmic framework and simultaneously forms the basis for looking at what gradually emerges on the surface. Through the interplay of linear structures and translucent layers of pigment, forms and possible figurations slowly appear, only to dissolve again. Kubiak’s brushstrokes — fine, precise, and cumulative — function as drawing tools, generating chromatic fields in which line, structure, and figure remain in continuous interaction..
The paintings operate through restraint: motifs emerge and recede without stabilising into fixed imagery, leaving perception in flux. Depth, rhythm, and tonal modulation unfold gradually, rewarding sustained attention, situating the viewer in a contemplative, process-based encounter.
For this exhibition, Kubiak introduces subtle architectural interventions, extending selected works beyond the wall. This shift allows the paintings to engage more directly with the surrounding space, where structure, perception, and movement unfold in relation.
Kubiak’s practice develops a consistent pictorial language in which historical painting techniques are connected to modern abstraction. At the same time, his work is not concerned with fixed representation, but with the conditions of seeing itself. In the subtle oscillation between appearance and disappearance, his oeuvre affirms painting as a space of sustained perception.
Johannes Ulrich Kubiak (b. 1961, D) lives and works in Antwerp; his works have been presented in exhibitions across Europe and are held in private and public collections including Deutsche Bank, Bundesbank, Kunstsammlung Sachsen, and the Berlinische Galerie, BMLK, Frankfurt (D).