The Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland has unveiled the poster for its 78th edition this summer, created by Turner Prize-winning German artist Wolfgang Tillmans after last years poster from Annie Leibovitz.

The poster for Locarno 2025 depicts the festivals trademark leopard on a tree branch amid an acid trance of yellow and purple abstraction, according to the fest. 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 using an experimental Xerox technique, which gives images a blurry texture and allows the artist to approach composition through the lens of early digital abstraction, Locarno said. 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 worlds most famous leopard finds itself.

Tillmans brief was quite specific: the poster had to feature a leopard and the color yellow. 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 16-year-old teenager, Tillmans explained.

Maja Hoffmann, president of the Locarno Film Fest, called this years poster a tribute to imagination that captures the bold, emotive, and dynamic spirit of cinema, adding: Like cinema itself, [Tillmans] work explores the layers of perception with a sensitivity that challenges conventions. 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.

Added Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarnos 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.

He concluded: Wolfgang Tillmans artwork offers us the image of a world in which we can all live and work together.

Locarno 78 is set to run Aug. 6-16.