Here's an example project with a grid view I made a while ago, that draws images into the cells in :drawCell. No sprites involved:
It seems like you may be putting images into sprites that may not need to be—you can just draw them into the gridview directly.
Disclaimer: it has been a while, and I didn't go through your code in detail!
(Sprites are useful to overlay on other things, and my example project DOES use a sprite in that way to magnify the chosen image if you hit (A)—but that's separate from the grid view.)