Hettie Inniss: The Waiting Room
GRIMM is pleased to announce The Waiting Room, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Hettie Inniss, on view at the Amsterdam gallery from October 24 to December 6, 2025. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition in Amsterdam (NL) and her largest exhibition to date.
In these new works, Inniss continues to work from her involuntary memories, focusing on the unexpected moments where our senses are stimulated and the mind transports us to familiar or uncanny spaces. Throughout, she visualises what a site of memories can look like and how these repositories of information are limitless. In this respect, she draws from Jorge Luis Borges’ philosophy of memory, namely in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), wherein a fictitious library of infinite space and books functions as a keeper of all thought – an endless repository of chimeric dreams.
One such site that Inniss represents in these new works is the train station, drawn to both its physical structure and function as a transitory space of waiting, giving the exhibition its title. The station is a liminal space that one only ever passes through, and it is precisely this indeterminacy that allows it to be ascribed with new layers of information drawn from memory. Often, the curved metal arches of the station are shown to intersect with the outstretched branches of trees, the firm rigidity of the engineering becoming entwined with the unpredictability of the natural world. These boughs and stems can also be seen to resemble arteries and veins within the human body. Indeed, throughout Inniss’s work she is shown to paint the body without painting the figure, representing a person, presence or energy without its physicality.
There is a constant push and pull within the paintings’ surfaces, with Inniss describing the process as one of losing, adding, and manipulating data. She refers to the ‘push’ as the creation of depth through layering paint over distinct strokes, thereby a loss of visual information, also achieved through the wiping away of previous marks. The ‘pull’ is the layers that sit boldly on top, reaching towards the viewer. Inniss considers how loss is inherent to painting, a process that gives way to a desire to search, a thematic impulse as well as a constant negotiation across the picture plane.
Her inimitable palette of all-over electric colour contains various textures, the paint often interspersed with areas of grainy, sand-like textures with dense strokes from oil stick. Inniss works on several paintings at the same time, so it is not uncommon to see the same motifs creep between them, each offering a different web of memory and its associated layers of information. Her family kitchen, another site of waiting, appears both as a tiled floor and a grid within one composition, tilted 90 degrees to show the full room, itself seemingly existing in a dream-like state.
One other literary reference for these works is Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), the experience of reading Inniss describes as ‘feeling like how I paint’. Morrison’s use of magical realism creates a tension between the legible and the fantastical, much like the recollection of memory. As Morrison does in her novel, Inniss expresses emotions through depicting the disruption of the mundane or otherwise tangible environments, disruptions that occur through engagement with the senses in the process of recollection.
Inniss is interested in how loss affects memory and the senses, how it creates a sense of longing for things that aren’t there. Certainly, the space of memory is often conceived of as comforting because it is familiar, yet by being in the past, it is a space that eventually one has to leave. In their own way, the spaces of memory become spaces of loss, while at the same time offering a sign towards change and growth.
About the artist
Hettie Inniss (b. 1999, London, UK) lives and works in London (UK). Inniss is a British Caribbean artist who graduated from the Painting MA course at the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2023, and was awarded the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship in 2022. In October 2023, The Tate Collective commissioned her to create an artwork in response to a piece in their collection. She was included in the Artsy Vanguard 2025, an annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today.
Inniss has participated in multiple group exhibitions, including The Garden of Earthly Delights, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Beyond these Walls, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); a duo presentation with Cece Philips, Digestif - [diːʒɛˈstiːf], Palazzo Monti, Brescia (IT) and The Painted Room, curated by Caroline Walker, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL).
Her work is held in the permanent collection of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Al Thani Collection, Paris (FR); Canopius Collection, London (UK); Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg (DE) and Reading, VT (US); Longlati collection, Shanghai (CN); Lakeside Collection, Rotterdam (NL); New Light Collection, Yorkshire (UK); Palazzo Monti Collection, Brescia (IT); and Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US).
