Moonwalk

Andy Warhol turned one of history's most iconic photographs into pure Pop Art with this 1987 pair called Moonwalk. The source was the famous shot of an astronaut standing beside the American flag during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, an image burned into the memory of millions who watched the Moon landing unfold. Warhol gives us the same figure twice, once bathed in gentle yellow and once flooded with electric pink. Same astronaut, same flag, same lunar surface, yet each version carries a completely different feeling thanks to nothing more than a swap of color.

Borrowing pictures from news, advertising, and everyday life was Warhol's signature move, the same trick he pulled with Marilyn Monroe, Campbell's soup cans, and countless other famous faces and objects. His logic was clever: take something so familiar that people stop really seeing it, then recolor and repeat it until it feels new again. The bright, artificial tones here also carry a quiet reminder that even a monumental event like walking on the Moon reaches us secondhand, filtered through photographs and printed reproductions.

This turned out to be among the very last works Warhol made. He died in February 1987, the same year he created Moonwalk, closing out a career built on transforming the ordinary and the iconic into something bold and unmistakably his own.