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©Wolfgang Tillmans
Internationally regarded as one of the most influential and prolific artists of our time, Wolfgang Tillmans’ impact extends beyond the art world into music and pop culture, shaping how we perceive images—and, by extension, our reality. His practice pairs intimacy and playfulness with a commitment to social awareness and a persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Guided by a profound sense of curiosity, Tillmans seeks to expand the poetic possibilities of the medium of photography while addressing the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.
Tillmans produced the poster for the Locarno Film Festival using his experimental Xerox technique, which lends the image a blurry texture and allows the artist to approach composition through the lens of early digital abstraction. Combined with its psychedelic color palette, the poster is both a throwback to '80s and ‘90s iterations of the Locarno poster, which were often impressionistic and themselves bordering on abstraction, as well as a bold reimagining of the visual landscape in which the cinema world’s most famous leopard finds itself.
Wolfgang Tillmans: “At first the brief seemed oddly specific: ‘Locarno poster must feature a leopard and the color yellow’. At the end of a long night session at my studio this January I felt happy that I answered the brief with an even more specific cocktail of three ingredients: On the glass window of my old color laser photocopier I brought together a photograph of a leopard lying on a tree, which I had taken in Kenya seven years ago, with two fake leopard fur mittens, which I had sewn myself as a sixteen years old teenager. The old school copier scans in four passes for the four colors CMYK and I moved the photo and the fluffy mittens in such a way that the scanning process revealed a good share of yellow in the resulting print, whilst other colors flashed up around the edges.”
Maja Hoffmann, President of the Locarno Film Festival: “This year’s poster for the Locarno Film Festival is a tribute to imagination and captures the bold, emotive, and dynamic spirit of cinema. In his work Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most significant artists of our generation, blurs the boundary between abstraction and reality. Like cinema itself his work explores the layers of perception with a sensitivity that challenges conventions. I am thankful to Wolfgang for creating a work of art that will inevitably become the first impression and the invitation to this year’s Festival, one known for championing independent cinema, cinematic artistry, new voices, and innovation. The Locarno Film Festival is a celebration of the power of storytelling, creativity, and diversity, and continues to explore the beauty of images on every level.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director: “Wolfgang Tillmans’ sensual artwork reminds us of all the unexplored potentialities of the film medium and cinema, while imagining a new landscape where creativity unfolds in new forms, shapes, and colors. In this fluid and unexplored landscape, where everything is still possible, new combinations of dreamlike colors and shapes dance together weaving a tapestry of hope. Wolfgang Tillmans’ artwork offers us the image of a world in which we can all live and work together.”
The 78th Locarno Film Festival will take place from 6 to 16 August 2025.