Driven by a belief that sophisticated design should be more democratically available to a mass market, interior designer Verner Panton is celebrated for his furnishings which showcase experimentation with new materials. One of his best known and continuously manufactured designs is the Panton Chair (also called the S Chair) developed together with Vitra and released in 1967; it is an early example of a cantilever chair made from a single piece of molded plastic. Panton, who began his career as a painter, studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. He splashed his signature aesthetic of playful geometric forms rendered in bold color across his interior designs for the Spiegel Publishing House in Hamburg (1968–69) and the Visiona Exhibitions in Cologne (1968 and 1970). Panton’s work was the subject of a traveling retrospective shown at the Vitra Design Museum in 2000. The artist has exhibited across Europe and in New York, Seoul, Taichung, and Tokyo.