After languishing in the shadows through the English country house design craze and the ultra-minimalism phase, Danish designer and architect Verner Panton is now on a roll. His hip futuristic designs from the '60s and '70s are scoring record prices both in auction houses and galleries.

“Above all, his lighting is on the global radar screen right now,” says Zesty Myers, who heads Manhattan's R 20th Century, aided by a Rolodex bulging with clients across the United States, Europe and Asia. Yet a decade ago, Panton examples were tossed in Dumpsters and scattered in gritty thrift shops, says Myers. Two years ago, he held a retrospective at his gallery as well as at New York's Modernism Show. Prices for Panton's plastic-ball lamps hovered around $60,000 and all sold out. “Now those prices are close to double,” says Myers.

Enthusiasm for Panton's space age-looking lighting has spilled over into the auction houses. At Christie's New York, Panton's 1969 “Fireball” light, dripping with blue balls, jumped to a record-breaking $87,235 last December. Now his furniture also has begun to skyrocket dramatically in value. At Phillips, de Pury & Company this May, a prototype “S” chair leaped over its modest $6,000 to $8,000 estimate and sold for a hefty $62,400.

Certain to spark even higher prices is the appearance of Panton on the gallery scene. AXA, the global insurance and financial giant, is hosting a major retrospective devoted to the designer. The Manhattan AXA Gallery has joined with the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and launched “Verner Panton: The Collected Works,” which runs through October 1. This exhibition is a veritable lexicon to the great Dane. It's packed with his boldly patterned fabric designs, futuristic furniture, vibrantly colorful light fixtures and molded plastic chairs.

To understand just how revolutionary this designer is, one must look at his early training. Panton studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the 1940s, where he met Pøul Henningsen, the internationally renowned lighting designer. Along with Henningsen, Denmark's leading furniture designer and architect Arne Jacobsen served as his mentor. While Panton's training was rooted in the Scandinavian tradition of hand-craftsmanship, he sought to explore new materials and new methods to produce entire new shapes. So during the funky 1950s, the young Dane traveled Europe in a camper van, which he converted into a rolling design studio, trolling for new directions in design and interiors.

As early as 1960, Panton was creating radical furniture. His Peacock Chair for Plus-Linje boasted wafer-like cushions set in an inverted wire dome. “Today, many collectors in Europe own his examples from his Cone Chair series,” says Mathias Remmele, who curated the AXA exhibition. By 1967, Panton was labeled a trailblazer with the introduction of his Panton Chair, manufactured by Vitra. In the entire history of furniture, this chair was the first to be made in one piece and totally from a synthetic-plastic. A bold swooning curve in vibrant primary colors from green to red, his stacking chair literally ushered in a new era of design. Plus, it was remarkably cost-effective, taken from a single mold, thereby eliminating any assembly. Even its color over the then-requisite pastels, taupes and whites was distinctly different-a palette departure that was right in sync with Op and Pop Art. Now, with a resurgence of interest in the '60s from the fashion world, Panton's vividly colorful designs are perfectly in tune with these times, reports Pari Stave, AXA Gallery curator. And as Panton himself once said: “Color is more important than form.”