Locarno Film Festival reveals poster designed by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman designs poster for 79th Locarno Film Festival Keystone-SDA

American artist Cindy Sherman plays on her signature themes of masquerade and transformation for the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.

The 79th Locarno Film Festival (August 5-15) presented the official poster on Wednesday. The subject was produced especially for the festival by US artist and photographer Cindy Sherman.

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“Describing her contribution as a ‘great honour’, she pays tribute to the Festival’s historical image of itself: a constructed character appears in stark black and white, framed by a billowing leopard‑print scarf rendered in a vivid, blazing yellow, suggesting both glamour and camouflage, revelation and disguise,” said the press release drawing parallels with cinema from film noir and neorealism to classic Hollywood.

The Festival’s president Maja Hoffmann is quoted as saying that Sherman has changed the perception of the world by using the camera not to document reality, but to show how identity is staged, performed and shaped by culture.

Artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said that “Sherman’s ecstatic gaze” conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty – a tension that transcends the image itself. He is referring to the resemblance of the female figure on the poster to its creator.

Cindy Sherman has made a name for herself internationally with photo series that deal with identity, role models and physicality. In 1999, the magazine “ArtNews” ranked her among the “10 best living artists”. On the art market, her works are among the most expensive in the field of photography, with prices as high as three million dollars.

Sherman’s works are exhibited in museums around the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. In 2014, her works were on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich under the title “Cindy Sherman: Untitled Horrors”.

Adapted from German by AI/ac

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