Los Angeles based Cargo Collectiive just added a really sweet page on their site: a “Team Picks” page. One thing we caught on there was a pick from our friend Folkert Gorter. He picked a photo that looked like a girl whose face was melting or something. It was really interesting and led us down a path of clicking until we found that the artist is an illustrator named Steve Kim and–Surprise!–he’s Los Angeles based.

Kim’s work are these really abstract, often minimalistic illustrations. They’re usually geometric, bright, and sometimes feature faces or lifelike items, like Ceiling Cat mixed in with the aforementioned face-melting girl (which was an illustration for an article on The Verge). He’s taken to doing abstracted realistic portraits of Tumblr users and even designed a website that we don’t believe is around anymore but was dedicated to local artist studio visits (Fluffy Fluffy Visits). In each of these projects, he brings a delicate touch to abstraction. They’re so elegant and almost painfully 2012: I’m obsessed.

Usually when I find someone that’s doing cool work, I sit on it for a few days or weeks and wait until “the right time.” Not this one: I literally found it twenty minutes ago and pushed the other posts I was writing until later in the day. I think his work is that great. Take a peek at more of our favorite pieces of his below and, of course, spend some time snooping around his website.