Veteran German artist Wolfgang Tillmans has designed the official poster for this year’s Locarno Film Festival, which runs August 6-16. 

The poster features Locarno’s customary leopard on a tree branch amongst an acid trance of yellow and purple abstraction. Tillmans produced the poster using his experimental Xerox technique, which blurs an image. 

Discussing the poster, Tillmans said he initially found the assignment of designing the poster “oddly specific.”  

“‘Locarno poster must feature a leopard and the color yellow,’” Tillmans said he was told. “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,” Tillmans added. 

“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.”

Born in Germany but long associated with the UK, Tillmans is one of the most beloved contemporary visual artists. He won the Turner Prize in 2000 and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2013. 

Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno Artistic Director added: “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.”

Check out the poster below.