Danish designer Verner Panton had the rare capacity to create his own unique design universe, where his uncompromising exploration of form, colour and, not least, light resulted in a number of timeless products. For the first time, the entire exhibition space of the building is occupied by one single exhibition.

Verner Panton, Vision & Play, a retrospective exhibition with the ’enfant terrible’ of Danish design history, who refused to adapt to prevailing doctrines of taste, discarding all norms and traditions in Danish design tradition. And who said: "A less successful experiment is preferable to a beautiful platitude." Verner Panton, Vision & Play includes highlights from his essential production of furniture, lighting and textiles and, not least, the fantasy landscapes that challenge all our senses.

Verner Panton had roots in traditional Danish design, but went in the opposite direction of most of Danish colleagues. He experimented and used untraditional materials like plastics, fibre glass, perspex, steel, foam rubber and other synthetic materials. Panton also took advantage of the new technologies of the post-war era and was the first in the world to create a form-moulded chair in plastics without any joints, the Panton Chair, which became synonymous with 1960's pop culture. Today, the chair is a 20th century design icon.

With the Panton Chair as well as a wide range of other chairs, sculptural lighting designs, spatial fantasies and visionary landscapes, Verner Panton earned his place in international design history. Visionary, imaginative, bold and provocative are terms that have been used to describe his works over the years. Despite great popularity on the international design scene, Panton met resistance at an early stage in his career in Denmark, which was not ready to embrace his alternative to the traditional functionalism that dominated Danish design in the 1950's and 60's.

The exhibition shows outstanding highlights from Verner Panton's extensive oeuvre from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. Among other things, the exhibit features a reconstruction of Panton's fantasy landscape "Visiona II" from 1970, a sensual treat, where one walks through a vast, limitless and cave-like room.

Quite in Panton's spirit, during the exhibition period the Danish Design Centre is transformed into one large Panton universe, where the DDC's café and lounge are decorated with Panton furniture, lighting and fabrics. Since 1963, Panton lived in Basel, Switzerland, close to the countries where his designs had their breakthrough, and where many of them were produced.

"Verner Panton, Vision & Play" was produced shortly after Panton's death in 1999.

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