Image: Pace Gallery, New York
Pace will present an exhibition of new paintings by Kraków-based artist Krzysztof Grzybacz at its London gallery from September 4 through October 3, 2026. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the UK, ‘Haruspex’ will bring together eight new paintings, including his largest work on a single surface to date.
Across the exhibition, Grzybacz considers the body as a layered structure that retains traces of earlier selves, asking how memory and lived experience remain present as it changes and ages. Developed intuitively from studio sketches, fragments of thought, and subconscious associations, the paintings operate as self-contained worlds while all tying into a new conceptual direction for the artist.
Throughout his practice, Grzybacz has examined the shifting relationships between the human body, everyday objects, and the natural world, working primarily in oil on canvas to render bodily forms and nuanced states of color with an intuitive painterly precision; his early works focused on everyday objects—including nail clippers, lighters, and makeup palettes—alongside fantastical figures composed of multiplying clusters of eyes, mouths, and noses, while beginning in 2022 he turned increasingly to botanical motifs, developing unsaturated, polychromatic compositions drawn from both nature and memory.
‘Haruspicy’ (2026), the artist’s largest single-surface painting at over four meters wide, shares its central motif with ‘Torso’ (2026); in both works, layers of textile merge with bodily forms, creating a tension between passages that read as highly abstract and others that feel materially immediate. Here, haruspicy becomes less a literal subject than a metaphor for painting itself: an attempt to peel back, inspect, and interpret what lies inside.
Grzybacz applies paint in thin layers before scraping, washing, and removing it to expose the white canvas beneath.
