In the summer of 1987, André Heller created what he referred to as “a carnival of the avant-garde.” An Austrian artist of growing renown, Heller drew on his childhood love of the Wurstelprater, an 18th-century amusement park in Vienna, to create a cross between a fair and an open-air gallery in Hamburg, Germany. He called the project Luna Luna, and in the nearly four decades since its debut, the other creatives who contributed to it—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring—have remained among the most famous names in modern art history. However, until 2023, Luna Luna had been all but forgotten.
Heller long dreamed of reviving it, but ambitions for a European Luna Luna tour or for the city of Vienna to buy the project were soon abandoned. Then, its sale to the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation resulted in a protracted legal battle, leaving Luna Luna to sit boxed up in a rural Texan warehouse for years.
But all that would change when an intern sent entrepreneur Michael Goldberg, now a partner and chief experience officer of Luna Luna, an article about the 1987 fair in 2019. After making contact with Heller’s studio, Goldberg approached rapper Drake and his media company, DreamCrew, which—without knowing the condition of the works—agreed to buy all 44 crates that housed the original installation and ship them to Los Angeles.
“It’s such a difference, seeing a photo of something versus seeing it in real life,” Goldberg tells Vogue. “I definitely was close to having a panic attack before that first container was opened.” When Goldberg entered Luna Luna’s new home—a 50,000-square-foot Los Angeles warehouse—for the first time in January 2022, one attraction caught his eye immediately: a carousel by Keith Haring. “The handlebar was sticking out of the packaging,” he remembers. “The light caught it and glistened, which just gave me confidence that the work was going to be in good condition, and then, sure enough, once they unpacked [them], it looked like it could have been painted days ago.”
A year later, Luna Luna opened in Los Angeles to great fanfare, attracting more than 150,000 people—and this week, after months of planning and preparation, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” made its East Coast debut at The Shed in New York City.
There, visitors can immerse themselves in delights including that Haring carousel (with three-dimensional versions of his famous line drawings for seats) and a Ferris wheel conceived by Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Viennese artisans painted the wooden structure, which dates back to 1933, in accordance with the artist’s instructions.) Elsewhere, Salvador Dalí’s geodesic dome boasts a mirrored interior meant to induce spatial hallucinations; David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree subverts nature with the painter’s signature vivid palette and crude spatiality; and a glass labyrinth by Roy Lichtenstein is paneled with images from his 1985 Perfect/Imperfect series.
But just as “Forgotten Fantasy” honors Heller’s original stable of artists, the New York experience also extends his vision, incorporating new work by members of today’s avant-garde. “The new commissions are led by a duo called Poncilí Creación,” Goldberg explains. “The second I saw their work, I knew they would be perfect for Luna Luna.” Identical twins Efrain and Pablo Del Hierro, who formed Poncilí Creación in 2012, are known for their daring performance art, employing puppets, sound, and movement. At Luna Luna, their installation PonciliLand (2024) invites revelers to assemble bright rubber building blocks into fantastical creatures.
While several of the works at The Shed are for display only (namely, the creations by Haring and Basquiat, along with Kenny Scharf’s painted chair-swing ride—though all were fully functional in Luna Luna’s original iteration), PonciliLand channels some of the interactive spirit (think: live fire-breathers and clowns on stilts) that was also part of Heller’s scheme. “The performers and this cast of characters that André brought into the park added an extra layer of surprise,” Goldberg says. “As you can see from the photos, they were a bit mischievous and interacted in this special way with all the guests. When I saw Poncilí perform, it felt like they were cut from the same cloth.”
No matter how times change, technologies shift, and art progresses, the need for fantasy remains a human truth. It’s not for nothing that Leonardo da Vinci’s final work comprised a festival thrown in the summer of 1518: The artist painted a blue canopy with gold constellations and costumed musicians as planets. Today, no tourist can visit that work in The Louvre and no billionaire can buy it at auction; its beauty was in its ephemerality. You had to be there. And this month, in New York City, you have to be at Luna Luna.
