I’ve often look at Ellsworth Kelly for inspiration on color and shape. His minimal aesthetics and mastery of clean surfaces makes him one of my art heroes. The fact that he is still creating some really great art and remains active in the art world sets such a high standard for the rest of the creative community. One can only aspire to have such a life. His works are timeless.

Throughout his career, Kelly has worked with curvilinear shapes, exploring their abstract potential without losing their biomorphic allusions. As seen in the first gallery, he introduces variations of scale and color, suspending forms gracefully on the white ground of the paper. The second gallery presents Kelly’s first engagement with printmaking — Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs (1964–65), created for Maeght Éditeur — which is a kind of concordance of forms Kelly had been refining in his paintings during the prior decade. The inherently repetitive nature of the printing process allowed the artist to reshuffle these basic shapes in a range of colors while maintaining cohesion throughout the suite.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents the first retrospective of the artist’s prolific print practice since the late 1980s. Runs through April 22, 2012.