Keith Haring, Painted carousel. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy. Opening Exhibition View. (Photo: Jeff McLane).

Entering Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is like stepping into a long-abandoned haunted carnival that somehow triggers overwhelming waves of throat-choking emotion. Housed in a massive double warehouse in Downtown LA, the evolving exhibition is the restoration of a 1987 art amusement park in Hamburg, Germany. It features large-scale rides, attractions, pavilions, and installations created by a cross-section of artists, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, and Sonia Delaunay.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy. (Photo: Joshua White)

The brightly colored rides are still, a sharp contrast against the black-walled rooms. We approach them gingerly, afraid of their eerie energy, and also because we want to take in every minute detail of these dormant artworks from culture-changing artists, many of whom are long gone. Joyful and playful carnival-style music is piped through the speakers, and Scharf’s characterful swings suddenly come to life, going full speed. The room dims, and spotlights dot and swirl as a phantom orchestra plays near Hockney’s multicolor cylindrical “Enchanted Tree.” Yards upon yards of yellow tarp have huge depictions of Haring’s identifiable characters. They feel mazelike, but in actuality, they flare out geometrically in four directions from a Haring-created carousel. It spins intermittently, showing off three-dimensional, ridable versions of Haring’s dancing people and animals. In the second room, Basquiat’s baboon butt Ferris wheel dominates the space, every surface covered with his oft-imitated-but-never-duplicated drawings. Even after seeing the other attractions moving, when Basquiat’s wheel begins its revolution, it comes as a shock. The entire exhibition leaves us speechless.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Painted Ferris wheel, accompanied by music. (The wheel was accompanied by Miles Davis’s 1986 song “Tutu.”) Luna Luna Forgotten Fantasy. (Photo: Joshua White).

Luna Luna was the vision of Viennese multi-disciplinary artist and all-around smooth talker André Heller. He approached artists from around the globe, convincing them to participate in his improbable pop art pipe dream and turned it into a tangible, practical reality. During the three months the park was open, 300,000 people visited it, taking advantage of the fully functional attractions. Heller’s original idea was, in true carnival fashion, to take Luna Luna on the road and set it up in different cities.

“People I’ve worked with have said [Heller] can convince you of anything; he has that kind of magnetic personality,” says Luna Luna’s curatorial director, Lumi Tan. “He started talking to people in the early ‘70s, so it was a very long process of convincing people. He went after very big names first, like Sonia Delaunay and Salvador Dalí. And then everyone else was like, ‘Oh, they signed on?’ When he went to visit David Hockney, he said, ‘You should ask for Lichtenstein.’ It was artists’ networks in that way too.”

Performers in front of Sonya Delaunay’s entrance archway. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy. (Photo: Sarah Mathison).

Heller first attempted to sell Luna Luna to his hometown of Vienna. Later, it was purchased by the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. It wasn’t a smooth transition. The involved parties were in complicated international litigation for 15 years while the collection sat in storage containers. In 2006, the Birch Foundation took legal possession of the Luna Luna collection and moved it to Texas, where it continued to sit in storage containers.

Five years ago, creative director Michael Goldberg read about the original Luna Luna on an art blog and became obsessed with the idea. He contacted Heller, who connected him with Daniel McClean, an art attorney with whom he had been working through Luna Luna’s legal issues. Goldberg brought in Anthony Gonzalez, who is part of Drake’s DreamCrew, and a major investor in Luna Luna. The newly formed partnership, also called Luna Luna, now owns the collection. They unpacked the containers and made Heller’s original dream of a traveling carnival come true, with the first stop being the current exhibition in Los Angeles.

“When I tell people about it, they say it sounds like a fever dream,” says Tan. “That’s very much in line with [Heller]’s biography and artistic career. He’s a storyteller. He’s a mythmaker. There are many versions of him that proliferate through his art. He’s very poetic, and everything sounds like a tall tale.”

The backstory of Luna Luna is embedded in the exhibition, beginning with a fast-paced but comprehensive via that is shown upon entry. Every step of Luna Luna’s inception and development is documented by photographer Sabina Sarnitz, whose images are laid out scrapbook style and show a lot of the behind-the-scenes activity.

It’s best to take a sharp right through Delaunay’s majestic gateway to the second room rather than gravitate toward the magnetic pull of the cacophony of color in front of you. In the second room is an extensive historical, art, and pop cultural timeline that explains everything that inspired Luna Luna, its visionary, and the participating artists. At the end of the timeline are ephemera and artifacts, including merchandise from the original park, such as T-shirts, posters, and tote bags. A Philip Glass-scored 34-minute Luna Luna origin story film thoroughly explains everything about the concept, development, and execution of the project. The footage includes fantastic camera angles of the original park. Armed with this wealth of knowledge about Luna Luna amplifies the appreciation of it being resurrected.

Luna Luna Forgotten Fantasy, Archival Photography. (Photo: Sabina Sarnitz).

“The huge surprise was that it was all in very good shape, for the most part,” says Tan. “The presentation of Forgotten Fantasy shows the conservation has been very conscious of showing these rides and attractions as functional works that hundreds of thousands of people used. There are paint chips and maintenance that has to happen. We want to bring people into that as much as possible. The works are continuing to be conserved and worked on with our studio team through the run of the show. What we have on view is a fraction of the collection, about a third. We’re still working on the other part that’s not on view. It’s a very long-term process.”

It has taken two years from when the Luna Luna team brought the storage containers to Los Angeles to the opening of the exhibition on December 15, 2023. The restoration was focused more on cleaning than it was on functionality. The rides were built by professionals. Most of them are running on their original motors. The team even found the original hardware packed in the containers.

Luna Luna Conservation and Reassembly Photos. (Courtesy: Luna Luna, LLC).

“It’s pretty remarkable considering these containers weren’t climate-controlled or anything like that,” says Tan. “It shows the durability of these machines. They had been running for a long time. They were supposed to be outside and withstanding a lot. Having them in public, they’re on a very different schedule of maintenance. The motors are running for much longer.”

For his part, Heller, who is still creating art, is surely overjoyed at having his fantasy funfair reborn. Says Tan, “I think he felt very sentimental about the loss of Luna Luna and that it was out of his control and out of his hands. It was almost like a missing child.”

Tickets for Luna Luna have to be purchased in advance and are slotted for hour-long visits. Even without the “Moon Pass” which gets you into Dalídom, a geodesic dome with a mirrored interior, and a marriage ceremony at Heller’s Wedding Chapel as well as a twirl inside Hockey’s cylinder, true immersion into Luna Luna takes over two hours, and it is so worth it.