American photographer and artist Cindy Sherman designed the poster for the 79th Locarno Film Festival, which was unveiled on Wednesday. It features a character created by Sherman, rendered in stark black and white and wrapped in a yellow-spotted head veil.
The cheetah is the public image of the Locarno Festival, which awards the golden cheetah as a grand prize. By reinterpreting the iconic Locarno tiger “through her distinctive language of disguise and transformation,” Sherman pays tribute to the historical image of the festival itself, the festival said. “The built figure appears in stark black and white, surrounded by a billowing, bright yellow leopard-print scarf, suggesting magic and camouflage, detection and concealment.”
“Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential artists of our generation,” said Maja Hoffmann, President of the Locarno Film Festival. “She changed the way we look at the world by using the camera not to document reality, but to reveal how identity is represented, performed and shaped through culture.”
Nazzaro, Locarno Artistic Director: “Sherman’s work asserts the inalienable right to express oneself and compose one’s own narratives at a moment when alternative realities are increasingly replacing truth. In an age of global digital narcissism, the body is re-emerging as a central medium through which we redefine the role of images and our relationship to them. Wrapped in a leopard-patterned fabric, Sherman’s ecstatic gaze conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty – a tension that transcends the image itself, and emerges outward in The world has a dream-like intensity.
The Locarno 2026 session will be held from August 5 to 15.
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