Ryan Schneider, who until recently was best known for his heavily built-up paintings, takes almost the opposite approach to sculpture, following Constantin Brancusi who argued that “one should know how to dig out the being that is within matter.” Schneider neither assembles a three-dimensional object in space nor gives shape to a concept but seemingly releases his forms from their material. Working in wood, carving directly into fallen trees gathered from around his home in Joshua Tree, he produces organic abstractions and towering figures that feel at once ancient, otherworldly, and contemporary. Rough-hewn and ceremonial, they bear all the traces of their rapid, intuitive making, with multiple cuts that read like scars. Schneider’s process resembles excavation more than it does construction, as he seemingly draws out forms that do not so much represent as embody earthly matter and energies.
Rajesh Punj: Sculpture is relatively new in your practice, but your interest appears to go back to your childhood. Has the idea been with you for a long time?
Ryan Schneider: I grew up in a rural part of Indiana, with a forest adjoining the back of the house, acres and acres of forest. Every day, I would wander around in the woods, which developed into a real relationship with the trees and animals there. I also had a real love of sculpture back then. I didn’t know much about it, but I remember having a book on the German artist Georg Baselitz, which is also how I originally learned to paint. I had a lot of books, because, of course, it was pre-Internet back then. I had a Baselitz book, a Basquiat book, a de Kooning book, and a Pollock book. I would go through them and then paint in my basement. There wasn’t much culture where I grew up besides the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which had an incredible collection of African sculpture and Native American art, which I absorbed as well. So, Baselitz’s wood sculptures, African sculptures, and Native American objects really soaked into my psyche at an early age.
But it wasn’t until 2019, when I was 39 years old, that I started to make sculpture, and it was almost a random act. I had reached the end of the rope with painting; I felt like an indentured servant to paint, and I wasn’t satisfied with the work I was making. My career also wasn’t really where I thought it should be, for the amount of work I had done, and the time I’d been showing. A gallery in Copenhagen asked me if I would try making some sculptures. I remember thinking it was a strange thing to ask of me, but I immediately took a piece of wood and went at it with a small chainsaw, never having used one before. Weirdly, I had always had this fantasy about making wood sculptures, which wasn’t based on anything, and I had never learned about wood or making a sculpture. Then, when my gallerist said they would show them in a September exhibition they already had scheduled for me, I realized I had to.
RP: What was it about painting that you felt you had exhausted?
RS: I had been painting for myself since I was 13, pursuing it obsessively, painting almost every day. I was really influenced by Baselitz, de Kooning, Picabia, and Kirchner. I started with abstracted still-lifes and went through a lot of different phases. I ended up with something crude and heavily layered; I would paint onto these works for months and months until they were thick and incredibly heavy. I wasn’t able to move them, and I can remember physically and spiritually being in a very low place. My hands were not working properly after so many years of holding paintbrushes, and when I tried to make my first sculpture, I was convinced it was never going to work. Then, as soon as I gave up on it, I could see the sculpture very clearly. So, I finished it, and I knew it was something.
There are a few moments in your life as an artist when you think, “Oh, I’ve done something here. I need to pay attention to this.” I took a picture of it and sent it to this gallery, and they sold it the same day, which had never happened with my paintings. I would sell enough to get by, but not to thrive, and a lot of painters that I grew up with in New York were getting commissions. I started wondering why they were doing so well, and I was still figuring it out. Once I made the sculpture, it felt clear: this is what I’m supposed to be doing, this is what I’ve been trying for with all these years of painting. Making something three-dimensional felt right. That involves furiously cutting on and into the surface of the wood for it to take shape, while wood chips fly like smoke, and I’m not able to see what I’m doing a lot of the time. It becomes hypnotic, as I feel my way over the wood, an intuition. When I’m working, despite the physical demands, it can feel like I’m not there, to the point that I almost leave my preferences and intentions behind, allowing the sculpture to become what it wants.
RP: Possibly it’s as much to do with freeing yourself from being seated over a canvas for weeks and months at a time. Now, you are set within nature, able to walk around and see your sculptures in the round. You’ve gone from one extreme to the other, from New York to Joshua Tree, from taking vast amounts of time over a painting to cutting and carving into wood at a furious pace.
RS: It was a weird series of events. I was in a lot of pain from a car accident, so I went to an acupuncturist to start treatment, and she was muscle testing, asking my body what it wanted, and she said, “Your body wants to work. It wants to lift heavy things and be close to the earth.” She asked if that made sense to me, and I said, “No, not at all.” But then, when I started making the sculpture, I realized that was what my body had been craving—physical movement in real time and three-dimensional space, using my body as the tool, essentially, because when I’m holding the chainsaw or the angle grinder, I become an extension of the tool. I can recall a lot of serendipitous events happening that let me know that this was the path I was supposed to be on, and the moment when I gave up trying to sculpt, trying to make the perfect sculpture, was when I began making work that goes into the public realm.
Before that, I had all these preconceived notions in my mind of what a good painting was, and I wanted to become a good painter, whatever that means. Now that I’m older, I realize it didn’t make any sense, so I let go of it, and it was the most important thing I’ve ever done as an artist. Giving up on trying to know what I’m doing or trying to be good at it freed me to do whatever I wanted with the material I had; it proved a revelation. It wasn’t an easy decision, because I remember thinking that whatever career I had made for myself was over, that nobody would like what I was doing or understand it, a painter becoming a sculptor. But it was quite the opposite.
Ryan Schneider’s exhibition “Ceux qui nous guident / Last Human Teachers” is on view at La Citadelle – Centre d’art & Musée, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, through November 23, 2025. “Earth Canal,” at The Pit in Los Angeles, is on view November 1 through December 20, 2025.
