ArtistDanish
Werner Schou
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Werner August Hugo Schou was a Danish designer whose name is inseparable from the lamps he produced under his company Coronell Elektro A/S. Born in 1913 in Germany, Schou was active in the electrical and lighting trade well before he established Coronell - records place him managing an installation company in the late 1940s and early 1950s, where he built the practical knowledge of materials and circuitry that would later inform his design work.
In 1964, Schou founded Coronell Elektro A/S in Hellerup, on the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. He was both owner and sole designer of the firm from the outset, and early company advertisements from the early 1970s confirmed that all designs were his own. The lamps he produced over the following decades became among the most sculptural lighting objects of the Danish mid-century scene: staggered blades of copper, brass or aluminum arranged in layered formations, studded with glass or acrylic crystal prisms that caught and scattered light in jewel-like patterns across a room.
Schou worked across a broad material palette - copper was his most characteristic choice, but he combined it freely with black-lacquered metal, aluminium, iron and wood. His pendant, ceiling and wall lamps were designed with a craft sensibility that prioritized the visual impact of the object as much as its function as a light source. The 'Droppen' wall lamp in perforated brass and the copper-and-prism ceiling lights are among the models most consistently sought by collectors today.
Coronell Elektro operated for nearly three decades, closing in 1991. Werner Schou died four years later, in 1995. His lamps now circulate through auction houses across Scandinavia and the wider European design market, and are considered prime examples of Danish mid-century decorative lighting that sat slightly outside the mainstream Scandinavian functionalist tradition - closer in spirit to the decorative exuberance of the period than to the austere simplicity associated with Scandinavian design more broadly.
At auction, Schou's work appears at Swedish and Danish houses including Bruun Rasmussen, Stockholms Auktionsverk and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. Pairs of wall lamps in brushed brass and copper tend to be the most frequently offered lots.