Where movement becomes form: Ryan Schneider on sculpture and surrender

What does it mean to abandon the surface, not simply to leave painting behind, but to relinquish the very fiction of control it facilitates? For American painter-turned-sculptor Ryan Schneider, it hasn’t been a transition in the progressive sense, but a palpable rupture: a movement away from colour and composition toward material and matter itself. Ahead of his forthcoming exhibition Murmuración, at La Térmica, Málaga, June 4th – September 13th, 2026 (in collaboration with Alicia Gutiérrez Mármol, of Mármol and Fa, and Almine Rech Gallery), talk about the significance of his move away from painting to sculpture. Explaining how the works are not born of any single idea, but through exposure to wood and marble, learning their indentations, resistance, and identity through physical contact. In the process, circling material, hanging over it, pushing against it as much as yielding to it, before finally finding a vulnerable spot to puncture into, to mark the surface and make his presence felt. “I always start by asking the material what it wants to be,” he says, an act that relinquishes authorship for a greater uncertainty.

Painting carries doubt and deals in revision, sculpture doesn’t, it insists on consequence. As the late American sculptor Richard Serra wrote as part of his Verb List (1967–1968), “to lift, to prop, to balance” are not simply gestures but acts of physical consequence that require of the artist complete bodily engagement. Schneider’s works unfold within this field of risk, where every cut commits the body and binds the form. Exhausting himself until the material has successfully metamorphosed into a new entity, there is, as he explains, no reversal, no erasure, only the momentum of movement. “The material will only let you do what you can do to it.” The work is not planned in the way of a painting. These materials are cradled, committed to, creating their own dust and dirt that burn and bury themselves into the artist’s hands, as their substance manifests into a new version of itself; and it is the body that battles for that incarnation. The final form is born from a sustained period of performative action, not intended for an audience, neither designed to accompany the work, but absorbed into its surface, as Schneider’s energies are expelled into the body and bones of the sculpture. To come close to one of his works is to encounter such effort, an endeavour to craft something from raw matter in a manner that makes it feel entirely otherworldly. “It’s like a physical trip… spiritual, psychological.” This is sculpture as ordeal, and as evidence of self as action. As turn-of-the-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted, the body is not in space, it is of it; perception is already entangled with movement. Schneider’s forms emerge from that entanglement, where thinking happens through action, and action leaves its trace as form.

But what unfolds is closer to choreography than creation. “There is a dance to it.” The statement is deceptively simple. This is not metaphor but method. Chainsaw as an extension of his hand, Schneider enters a field of forces where balance is provisional, and the possibility of failure ever-present. In the terms of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Schneider is not executing a form but tracing a “line of flight,” a movement that escapes fixed form and gradually pushes him toward sculpture itself. In that sense, the sculpture does not pre-exist the act; it emerges from it. And that level of physical engagement recalls the late German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, who insisted, “I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them,” a distinction that resonates with Schneider’s concern for movement not as technique, but as necessity, compulsion, and a response to the pressure of matter itself. And yet this emergence is far from harmonious; for the artist it is unstable, unforgiving, and even violent. “It’s all mistakes… all trial and error.” Here, the work aligns less with classical sculpture than with what French philosopher Georges Bataille termed l’informe, a condition in which form is not elevated, but undone, brought back into contact with base matter. Schneider’s sculptures hover between intention and accident, between what exists within the material and what we wish of it. That slippage isn’t corrected but positively preserved. “Sometimes that’s the thing that’s holding it all together.”

This refusal of resolution unsettles the idea of completion and sculptural completeness. Works are returned to, stripped back, rediscovered, and reworked, and what once appeared unresolved becomes, with time, necessary. The work does not stabilise, it metamorphoses, and in that sense, Schneider extends a lineage that includes Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi, for whom material was never passive, but problematic, proving far more than its surface appearance. But where Brâncuși sought essence, and Noguchi equilibrium, Schneider pushes toward friction, toward a state in which material resists resolution and insists on its own agency. And yet, something remains. Unlike dance, which disappears in the instant of its execution, Schneider’s work leaves behind a residue of itself, a form that holds the essence and energy of its making, as he explains: “It’s like a memento… a physical residue.” What we encounter is not the act, but its aftermath, a compression of time, labour, and risk into matter. The audience arrives after the event, yet still feels its force. To look at a work is to reimagine what can no longer be seen: the violent breath of the chainsaw, the arc of his heavy arms, the torque of the body, the anticipation and final execution of the cut, leading to a frenzy of marks that appear as countless wounds across the material’s surface. Sculpture becomes a deferred action, a choreography stilled but not resolved. And as American art critic Rosalind Krauss suggested in her notion of the “expanded field,” sculpture here exceeds objecthood, operating between action and perception. Schneider occupies that unstable threshold, where making is not representation, but event. This is not the translation of movement into form, it is material under pressure, movement that has hardened into matter without ever relinquishing the possibility of collapse.

Rajesh Punj: You mentioned earlier that you had to use a forklift to move the work, and that you’d been working on it intensively for hours. It sounds like one of the most demanding pieces you’ve undertaken. Remind me, the wood itself, what is it?

Ryan Schneider: It’s called Sapele, S-A-P-E-L-E.

RP: Not a wood I was familiar with. You said it’s from the Congo in Africa. How did it come about that you’re working with it here?

RS: The people who organised the exhibition found it for me. I don’t know exactly how or why, but they sourced it in Portugal. So, I don’t really know how it made its way from Africa to Portugal, but that’s where it came from. What I’m discovering here is that people actually know this wood. It’s considered very special, exceptional to work with. Yesterday someone from the museum brought a local woodcarver to the studio. He makes these incredible carved spoons. When I told him it was Sapele, he just stopped, like it was something mystical. He told me that in parts of Africa it’s considered one of the most important, almost magical woods, a very spiritual tree. He said it’s an honour to work with it. And I already felt that. When I first saw the log, I had no idea it would be that big. I thought, this is crazy. It’s not something I would normally attempt, because it’s so hard to work with, almost impossible, because I can’t easily move it.