Saskia Noor van Imhoff: Handles Squeezed
GRIMM is pleased to present Handles Squeezed, a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Saskia Noor van Imhoff. This marks the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery and the first one at the new Amsterdam location on Leidsegracht 38-40. The opening coincides with Amsterdam Art Week (November 18 - 22, 2026).
Handles Squeezed is grounded in Van Imhoff’s ongoing research into mechanisms of collecting as a system of hierarchies and knowledge. She considers the forces that determine what is preserved and discarded, questioning how collecting shapes our understanding of what is considered valuable. Van Imhoff works within institutional depots, archives, and unintentional “organic collections” that she encounters outdoors. In recent years, she extended her studio practice to a former farm in the Dutch countryside. Within this close entanglement of nature and culture, she addresses ideas of stewardship and responsibility to the land.
The installation operates as an architectural intervention, building new systems and structures that exist in-between established ontologies. Rooted in land-based research and praxis, it draws on (agri)cultural remnants and their former uses. Raised load bearing beams from a demolished eighteenth-century farmhouse interact with the architecture, passing through openings in the floor or spanning gaps in space. Shade cloths guide movement through the architecture and partially obscures drying frames full of flowers, while grow lights under the floor create a simulated environment. This descent beneath the surface echoes the role of excavation in Van Imhoff’s methodology, both as a literal process of uncovering material and as a way of tracing the histories embedded within a site.
The act of shaping a landscape informs Van Imhoff’s engagement with historical and contemporary botany. Photographs of extinct or endangered plant species are translated into beeswax tablets. These conserved images evoke the gradual fading of these plants from both the land and our memory. Various branches, flowers, and roots are physically ‘grafted’ onto one another as new hybrid species, cast in bronze and petrified in time. Grafting—a botanical process of joining or propagating plant material—becomes a metaphor through which she considers the interconnectedness of disparate materials, histories, and ecologies. The production of bronze in itself is a process bound by supposed fixed ideas of order and cultivation. Here, welding seams have been left open and casting channels that guided the liquid metal remain visible, branching out like artificial roots.
Together, these interventions build self-contained ecosystems within the gallery, pushing it beyond the confines of a neutral display space and foregrounding how organic processes and planned environments meet and shape one another. The title refers to the small, familiar gesture of pruning, wherein each cut draws a boundary between control and growth, one that must be continually redrawn as plants sprout and the process begins again. This attention to transformation extends into her transdisciplinary research project REST, which examines both natural and human geomorphology on site using an archaeological technique that measures light-sensitive energy stored in minerals since they were last exposed to daylight, carried out in the dark under red light.
Van Imhoff follows different forms of residue, raising a recurring question within her practice: what does it mean to be in the margin, excluded or “left over,” who draws this line, and what happens when something that has been deemed expendable is reconsidered? How can these states of “in-between” allow contradictions to coexist, holding tension together rather than resolving it, allowing new understandings and chimeras to emerge? Within this liminal space, Van Imhoff’s installation unsettles the border of materials, processes and conventions until it is no longer clear where one ends and another begins. By shifting boundaries in the mechanisms of collecting new functions, meanings and possibilities emerge.
About the artist
Saskia Noor van Imhoff (b. 1982 in Mission, CA) lives and works in Amsterdam and Mirns (NL). Van Imhoff was awarded the 2017 ABN Amro ArtPrize (NL), the 2012 Walter Tielmann Prize for Book Design (DE) and the 2008 Gerrit Rietveld Academie Prize (NL) and nominated for the 2017 Prix de Rome (NL). Together with designer Arnout Meijer, Van Imhoff is the co-founder of REST, an artistic research foundation.
Van Imhoff has had exhibitions at various venues including: AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); the 11th Gwangju Biennial (KR); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (FR); Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL); De Appel, Amsterdam (NL); the Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden (AT); Frans Halsmuseum De Hallen, Haarlem (NL); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL); Kunsthal, Rotterdam (NL); the Moscow Biennial (RU); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL).
Van Imhoff’s work is included in the collections of ABN Amro Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); AMC Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam (NL); THE EKARD COLLECTION; Huize Frankendael, Amsterdam (NL); ING Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, Leiden (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); Rabo Art Collection, Utrecht (NL); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL); Textiel Museum, Tilburg (NL); Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke (BE), among many other public and private collections.
