Connie Hüsser

Connie Hüsser

The Beauty of Insignificance

Connie Hüsser has contributed substantially to the history of Swiss design even though her work cannot be assigned to any conventional design discipline. For over 20 years, she has been creating unique scenarios and strikingly beautiful three-dimensional collages, all daringly unabashed assemblages which are nonetheless of great clarity and cogency. With her unerring ability to identify trends, she anticipates what will later become the zeitgeist.
"What Connie Hüsser does and is cannot be learned," says Jörg Boner, President of the Federal Design Commission. "She is what she is thanks to her personality, her single-minded search for exceptional objects and combinations, her presence, and her discriminating eye." Trained as a visual merchandiser, she has taught herself what it takes to be an interior stylist, exhibition maker, design expert, and mediator. Driven by curiosity, this indefatigable explorer ferrets out special objects at trade fairs, in glossy magazines, on the Internet, and also in her immediate surroundings. Over the past decades she has amassed a dazzling archive of materials, colors, and objects which has become a repository of sources and inspiration for her many projects and commissions.
Design companies for which she serves as consultant, reap the benefits of that archive as do her own creations for showrooms, clinics, and hotels. In 2018, she mounted her first exhibition, labeled "Object with Love," for which she selected works made by various designers and put together a collage of objects with painstaking care.

A large table was arrayed with handicraft alongside the latest designs, mostly one-offs or products produced in a very limited edition.
To promote her "Objects with Love," Hüsser exploits larger platforms like the Vitra stand at the Salone del Mobile, the design trade fair in Milan. There she combined Vitra's iconic furniture with works by upcoming designers. Connecting young designers with manufacturers or companies is another of her passions. She brings the right people together thanks to her extensive international design contacts.
One of Hüsser's most radical and sustainable occupations is the styling for Vitra's now legendary catalogs Select, Arrange. Companies are still trying to imitate the unique atmosphere of their pictures, but without much success!
Dieter Van Den Storm, Creative Director of the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk (BE), describes his collaboration with Hüsser as follows: "Beside Connie’s generous character, she taught me to see the world differently. Through her eyes objects become magical, colors are brighter and materials more tangible. Details are more than just details. Suddenly the world becomes an object of love."
Connie Hüsser consistently enjoys success not least because of her strong, affirmative personality, her intuitive feel for the unusual, and above all her unerring eye. As she says herself: "Noticing accidental things, supposedly insignificant things, and recognizing their strength is probably my greatest talent."
Anna Niederhäuser