Forty years ago, Montreux Jazz Festival brought together the great US pop artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring to create the poster design for the annual event. The result was a vibrant fusion of styles celebrating jazz music and rhythm. Now, the festival has repeated the experiment for just a second time, uniting two acclaimed contemporary artists for a dream collaboration.
The 2027 poster design was created by the French illustrator Malika Favre and the Sri Lankan sculptural artist and designer Kumkum Fernando. The former's distinctive geometric graphic style merges with the latter's colourful retrofuturism in a striking maximalist design that channels diverse influences into the form of a divine being that represents music as a joyful, spiritual journey.
Montreux has a long history of artist-designed posters. Other previous contributors have included David Bowie, Jean Tinguely, Yoann Lemoine (Woodkid), Lakwena, Kévin Germanier and Christian Marclay.
Keith Haring designed for the festival twice. For his second commission, in 1986, he worked with Andy Warhol as a collaborator. The festival invited Malika to adopt a similar approach for her second contribution, ten years after her first design for Montreux.
While her 2017 poster stood out for its minimalism, the new design goes in the opposite direction. A densely packed arrangement of colour and shapes creates a fantastical figure that looks like a cross between a robot, sacred altar and a jukebox. In fact, the design is also being turned into a sculptural vinyl cabinet (see further below).
“I fell in love with the festival on my very first visit in 2017. The poster I created for that edition remains one of my personal favourites to this day. I knew it would be hard to match, so I wanted to take the opposite approach: to create a work bursting with colour, as maximalist as the first one was minimalist. Kumkum was the ideal artist for this,” Favre says of the collaboration.
The design draws on diverse influences, including South Asian traditions, retro-futurism and '60s counterculture. The flowers evoke the lakeside quays of Montreux but also the flower power movement of the hippie era, a nod to the fact that Montreux Jazz Festival was founded during the 1967 Summer of Love. The floral patterns also subtly outline lips, kisses and female faces – symbols of love, pleasure and sexuality that recur throughout Malika's artistic universe.
“I had this vision of music blooming in Montreux, this feeling of the entire town coming alive during the festival,” Favre adds. “I wanted to convey that joy. The world is going through strange times, and a festival like Montreux is an opportunity to celebrate. For me, flowers also symbolise eroticism, an explosion of the senses and the pleasures found in music. I always like to tuck in something a little cheeky, and I thought I could bring that touch of a feminine sensuality. When I sent the first flowers to Kumkum he said, ‘Oh yes, that’s sexy!’”
From the outset, the idea was also to bring the poster’s divine entity into the world as a three-dimensional object, following Kumkum’s practice of creating futuristic, geometric sculptures. The result is a made-for-order vinyl cabinet with a dedicated turntable compartment and pull-out drawers for record storage.
“The spark came when we noticed the resemblance between the shape of certain religious altars and that of a jukebox, both sharing the same sense of symmetry,” Fernando says. “We imagined a kind of gateway into a sacred realm of music, a timeless entity, part retro-futuristic robot, part mythological being, that embodies music as a joyful, universal experience.”
The 61st Montreux Jazz Festival will take place on the Lake Geneva shoreline from 2 July to 17 July 2027.
