Looking Beneath the Surface: Krzysztof Grzybacz and “Haruspex” at Pace Gallery London
Polish painter Krzysztof Grzybacz’s UK debut solo exhibition, Haruspex, runs at Pace Gallery in London from September 4 to October 3, 2026. Bringing together eight new oil paintings by the 1993-born artist—a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków—the selection treats the body not merely as a physical form, but as a layered site of memory bearing the traces of past selves, transformations, and lived experiences.
Painting as a Divinatory Metaphor
Nourished by workshop sketches, fleeting fragments of thought, and subconscious associations, Grzybacz’s canvases present self-contained worlds while marking a new conceptual chapter in the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition’s title derives from the haruspex—the priestly diviners in ancient Etruscan traditions who read the divine will by examining the entrails, particularly the liver and gallbladder, of sacrificed animals.
Though Grzybacz encountered the term only recently, he aligns the notion of peering beneath the surface and seeking meaning buried deep within layers directly with his own painting practice. For the artist, the ritual of reading viscera becomes less a literal subject matter than an allegory for the act of painting itself: peeling back canvas layers, looking inward, and interpreting what lies beneath.
Peeled Skins, Imaginary Textures, and Scraped Pigment
The works in the exhibition possess a sculptural materiality, defined by textures that seem to peel away from the surface, along with zippers, folds, and fissures in expanses of flesh rendered in raw beige and earthy tones. In Haruspicy (2026)—measuring over four meters wide and standing as the artist’s largest single-surface work to date—and Torso (2026), layers of fabric intertwine with corporeal forms. Rather than being copied from real textiles, these textures are imaginary forms developed through memory and the act of painting itself, much like his earlier botanical studies.
Embracing a subtractive approach to color, the artist applies paint to the canvas in delicate layers before scraping and washing it back to expose passages of raw canvas beneath. “Rather than adding more paint, I choose subtractive scraping and washing,” notes Grzybacz, for whom color permeates the surface not as a decorative skin, but as a residue bearing witness to its own making.
Violet Landscapes and Ghostly Flags
Having engaged with everyday objects—such as nail clippers, lighters, and makeup palettes—alongside hybrid figures composed of clustered eyes, mouths, and noses in his early work, the artist pivoted toward botanical motifs in 2022. Following exhibitions at institutions including Mendes Wood DM in Brussels, Harkawik in New York, and the X Museum in Beijing, this new selection brought to London sees enclosed bodily forms yield to desolate landscapes dominated by violet tones.
Fluttering on poles erected across these landscapes, pale and spectral scraps of cloth evoke flag-like forms, carrying an abstract and ambiguous symbolism rather than assuming a specific identity. Achieved by peeling away and stripping down the canvas, Grzybacz’s surfaces offer a quiet exploration into the unseen depths of both body and space.
