The discourse of signs, practised daily by our consumer and communications society, is what Nic Hess´ artistic analysis is all about. He targets emblematic symbols which are seemingly simple to decode in the context of the global village. The pouncing puma stands for a maker of sporting goods. The bunny for a men´s magazine. Hess, at the moment a scholarship holder at the renowned P.S.1 in New York, weaves these brand-names into stunning wall installations, ultimately using them as vocabularies for new stories and undermining their one- dimensional reception on the agenda of consumerism. 51 views of Mount Matterhorn is the name of a monumental picture for the European seat of the US firm Dow Chemical, prototypically brought to a point by Hess´ artistic method. The book of the same name not only includes a compendium of the signs and symbols Hess uses for his imagery. In it, those logos so familiar to us are also screened with respect to their legibility and meaning by means of lexical research. Thus, in their minds, viewers are able to develop a multitude of new narratives and perspectives which meet the supposed intellectual levelling of the world we live in with a playful, ironic and artistic attitude full of implications. The artist: Nic Hess, born 1968 in Zurich. 1992-1996 Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam; Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. In 1998, studio scholarship from the Binz Foundation 39. In 1999, Eidgenössischer Preis für Freie Kunst award. Lives and works in Zurich.