Verner Panton: Collected Works

until sunday july 12 2009
National Museum of Singapore
T : +65 6332 3659
93 Stamford Road
178897 Singapore
Singapore

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www.nationalmuseum.sg

Vitra Design Museum
info-weil@design-museum.de
www.design-museum.de/museum/ausstellungen/alle.php

"Most people spend their lives living in dreary, beige conformity, mortally afraid of using colours. The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting." - Verner Panton
Over a career that spanned almost half a century, Panton emerged as one of the most colourful, imaginative, innovative and forward-looking designers of the 20th century. This exhibition showcases more than 100 of his chairs, lamps, textiles and sculptures, seeking to capture the diversity of his works, which contributed significantly to the development of design in the latter half of the 20th century.

With the Panton chair, the first single unit cantilevered chair made of moulded plastic, he succeeded in creating one of the most famous chair designs of the century. His "Fantasy Landscape" room at the "Visiona 2" exhibition became an icon of the Sixties. Yet Verner Panton (1926 - 1998), a Danish designer who resided in Switzerland, was much more than a great master of Sixties design. Although extravagant forms and the use of intense, bright colours typify his work, it is undeniably grounded on the elegant Functionalism of the Fifties. And in spite of the creativity and joy of experimentation revealed in his oeuvre, he retained a systematic approach to design his entire life. His interest was not limited to the design of single objects, but extended to the development of groups of works and to the design of entire spaces. For this reason, Verner Panton's unusually extensive and divers work, now the subject of a comprehensive retrospective by the Vitra Design Museum, is rightly regarded today as a significant contribution to the development of design in the second half of the 20th century.