GridView must be placed inside a form tag with runat=”server” even after the GridView is within a form tag

You are calling GridView.RenderControl(htmlTextWriter), hence the page raises an exception that a Server-Control was rendered outside of a Form.

You could avoid this execption by overriding VerifyRenderingInServerForm

public override void VerifyRenderingInServerForm(Control control)
{
  /* Confirms that an HtmlForm control is rendered for the specified ASP.NET
     server control at run time. */
}

See here and here.