The Waiting Room

GRIMM is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Hettie Inniss, on view at the gallery in Amsterdam from October 24 to December 6, 2025. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam (NL).

In her works, shadows and contours seem to evolve into trees or organic structures, revealing a dreamlike vision. It is a world where nature gradually takes over and space itself seems to whisper a story. With vivid colors and layered textures, Inniss renders memories nearly tangible; she captures the sensation of imagery and light typically experienced only within the imagination or behind closed eyes, giving them a physical presence on the canvas. In doing so, she draws inspiration from the ideas of writer Jorge Luis Borges, particularly from his story The Library of Babel (1941), in which an infinite library stands as a symbol for all human thoughts and dreams.

A recurring motif in the exhibition is the train station. Inniss is fascinated by this space of waiting and transit. The station is a space one merely passes through, and precisely because of this, it acquires countless new layers of meaning and memory. Often in her paintings, the metal arches of the station merge with the branches of trees—the fixed and the mutable becoming intertwined. These forms at times evoke veins or blood vessels. Throughout her work, Inniss paints the human body without literally depicting a figure; she captures a presence or energy devoid of physical form.

Her distinctive use of color is intense and vibrant. She combines paint with granular, sand-like textures and bold oil pastel lines. Working on multiple paintings simultaneously, certain motifs recur across different canvases, each carrying its own network of memories. Her family kitchen, another site of waiting, emerges at times as a tiled floor or as a grid d