Stations of the Cross 1966

Barnett Newman made these paintings called Stations of the Cross at some point in his career, using paint on canvas. The thing that really grabs me here is how Newman uses these vertical lines, what he called ‘zips’, to cut through these monochrome grounds. It’s like he’s slicing the canvas open, revealing something underneath, or maybe creating a space for something new to emerge. Look closely at the edges of those zips, you can see where the paint is thick and almost crusty, like he was really working it, pushing it around. The grounds are a pale off-white, and the zips are a contrasting dark color, which gives the paintings this stark, graphic quality. The texture almost looks like the result of this push and pull, this tension between control and chance. Newman, like, say, Agnes Martin, invites us to slow down, to really see, and to feel. These paintings are not about answers, but about questions, about the ongoing search for meaning in a world that often feels chaotic and incomprehensible.