Which artist is known for his 'zip' paintings?

Barnett Newman is the artist known for his “zip” paintings.

Newman’s zips are narrow vertical bands of contrasting color that run through broad fields of paint. They do more than divide the canvas: Newman used them to organize space, while also making the color fields appear to expand, contract, or vibrate around the line. The term became closely identified with his mature style.

He developed this approach in the late 1940s, with the Onement series beginning in 1948. Onement I introduced the visual language that Newman refined throughout his career. His paintings are associated with both Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, though his work does not fit neatly into only one category.

The zips are easy to confuse with simple stripes, but Newman treated them as structural and expressive elements. Some works reduce the idea to an extreme: The Wild, from 1950, is a tall, exceptionally narrow painting whose single zip is virtually the entire composition. Newman also translated the motif into sculpture.