This is the Locarno Film Festival poster 2026
American conceptual artist Cindy Sherman has created the official poster for the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival—an enigmatic figure in black and white, draped in a yellow leopard-print scarf.
Cindy Sherman reinterprets the Locarno Film Festival poster
The official Locarno Film Festival poster for the 79th edition bears the signature of one of today's best-known conceptual artists: Cindy Sherman produced the motif exclusively for the festival. It shows a constructed figure in striking black and white, framed by a flowing leopard scarf in bright yellow - glamor and camouflage at the same time, revelation and disguise.
Sherman's artistic practice has been rooted in staging, transformation and role-playing for decades. Through a sequence of invented personas, her photographs question how visual culture - and cinema in particular, from film noir and neorealism to classic Hollywood - creates and circulates stereotypical images of women. For the Locarno Film Festival, she has reinterpreted the festival's iconic Leopard through her characteristic language of masquerade and transformation - an invitation she describes as a «great honor».
Identity, staging and the Locarno Leopard
Festival President Maja Hoffmann categorizes the artist's choice as follows: «Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential artists of our generation. She has changed the way we perceive the world - by using the camera not to document reality, but to show how identity is staged, performed and shaped by culture.»
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the festival, emphasizes the contemporary relevance of Sherman's work: «Sherman's work insists on the inalienable right to self-expression and authorship over one's own narratives - at a moment when alternative realities have begun to increasingly replace truth.» And further: «Wrapped in a leopard-patterned shawl, Sherman's ecstatic gaze conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty - a tension that transcends the image itself and radiates out into the world with somnambulistic intensity.»
79th Locarno Film Festival in August 2026
The 79th Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 5 to 15, 2026. Further information and the official poster in various formats are available on the festival website: https://www.locarnofestival.ch
