Herbert De Colle moves confidently through the worlds of symbols and images of recent decades, but never nostalgically—at most with a precisely measured dose of longing familiar to all who could only follow the romanticized highlights of recent pop and youth culture history from a distance in time and space. Born in 1978, De Colle has access to images, styles, and references that were already historical when he discovered them. He operates with the ambivalent knowledge of those who have experienced how “Imagine” became a computer advertisement, but still remember the inspiration these lines could provide for their personal lives, even years later. As a teenager at the end of the 20th century, De Colle was inspired by the past. As a conceptual artist of the early 21st century, he uses these references as source material for the production of his own time. Herbert De Colle studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Lives and works in Vienna.‍

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Emotion, a series of relatively flat, disc-shaped papier-mâché objects in standardized form, color palette, and size. What they have in common is their recognizability as the circle symbol with two dots and an arc underneath, which has become a universally readable and usable communication tool since its invention by American graphic designer Harvey Ball in 1963.

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www.herbertdecolle.com