Late last year, New York welcomed Luna Luna, Viennese artist and pop singer André Heller’s art theme park. It was Heller’s goal to create an amusement park with the biggest artists of the 1980s (think Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Roy Lichtenstein). Uncovered after 37 years in storage, the travelling theme park was lovingly restored, first taking up residency in LA, before moving to The Shed in New York. Soon, it will find a new home in Atlanta.
Keith Haring’s carousel – one of Luna Luna’s most notable exhibits – has inspired a playful new furniture collection with Gufram. The radical Italian design house has worked with the Keith Haring Foundation to reissue two of Haring’s original fairground seats, The Dog, and the Crawling Baby, which will soon be available to buy.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Gufram)
The new seats capture Haring’s renowned two-dimensional line drawings in sculpture form. His pop-art visual language is reproduced in polyurethane with a Guflac finish (a proprietary paint which leaves a leather effect, developed by the Italian design brand).
© Keith Haring Foundation. Licensed by Artestar, New York_Ph.© Sabina Sarnitz. Courtesy Luna Luna, LLC
(Image credit: Courtesy Luna Luna)
The park’s inaugural opening was in 1987 in Hamburg, Germany and attracted around 300,000 people in three months. It was Heller’s dream to get the park on tour, yet it never managed to make it to New York.
(Image credit: © Keith Haring Foundation/licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: © Sabina Sarnitz)
The theme park originally featured around 30 rides designed by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Sonia Delaunay, Rebecca Horn, Salvador Dalí, and David Hockney, in addition to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf.
The exclusive collaboration between Gufram and Luna Luna, in partnership with the Keith Haring Foundation, is an ode to the artist’s legacy. It will be available soon from lunaluna.com
