The 2026 Winter Olympics just got 10 gorgeous posters
The official posters for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were revealed today, and they're designed to introduce the world to some of Italy's foremost emerging artists.
For next year's Milano Cortina Games, 10 posters have been created: 5 for the Olympic Games and 5 for the Paralympic Games, featuring the work of 10 Italian artists (all younger than 40) hailing from different regions of the country. According to a press release from Milano Cortina, the artists were chosen in collaboration with the Triennale di Milano, an art and design museum in Milan that displayed the torches designed for the 2026 Games earlier this year.
The tradition of Olympic posters goes back to the 1912 Stockholm Games, when Swedish painter and illustrator Olle Hjortzberg was tasked with advertising the Games as a newly global media phenomenon. More than a century since then, the posters have become an integral symbol of each unique edition, ranging from an explosion of color for the 2016 Rio Olympics to a series of trippy designs for the 2020 Tokyo Games and a multimedia collection of high art for the Paris Games in 2024.
The Olympic posters
The five designers tasked with creating posters for the 2026 Olympic Games are all women: Flaminia Veronesi, Beatrice Alici, Giorgia Garzilli, Martina Cassatella, and Maddalena Tesser.
Veronesi, a 39-year-old from Milan, took the prompt in a whimsical direction with her work The Oasis of Play, a bubbly portrait overflowing with bright color and dynamic shapes.
'It tells how we create a parallel world when we play that is an oasis of joy,' Veronesi explained in a video promoting the designs, adding that the painting's subject represents 'a young athlete or young spectator' dreaming about the Games. Sprinkled throughout the work are Easter eggs referencing the Biscione of Milan, a symbolic dragon; the Dolomites mountain range; and the five Olympic rings.
Alici, a 33-year-old from San Donà di Piave, took a more literal approach with her work Silver Peaks, opting to render three true-to-scale Olympic athletes in the foreground of the Venetian Prealps. The composition's cold, subdued color palette draws viewers' eyes to the medals held by each figure—gold, silver, and bronze. In contrast, 28-year-old Cassatella, hailing from San Giovanni Rotondo, chose a warm palette for her painting Torch. The poster spotlights a close-up of two glowing, intertwined hands—reminiscent of the Olympic torch—in a deep range of reds and yellows.
'Representing a poster for the Olympic Winter Games has been, especially at the beginning, a challenge, since I did not want my work to be too explicit, too didactic,' Cassatella shared in a video interview. Instead of leaning too literally into the symbolism of the winter season, she chose to highlight a warmer image of unity and inclusion.
The Paralympic posters
Of the five posters created for the Paralympic Games by artists Roberto de Pinto, Andrea Fontanari, Giulia Mangoni, Aronne Pleuteri, and Clara Woods, several take a distinctly unexpected direction.
Perhaps the most abstract among them is 24-year-old Pleuteri's Untitled. The piece is a burst of brightly colored shapes made using digital sketches on paint, inkjet prints, and mixed-media add-ons, resulting in a composition that verges on chaotic. According to an interview with Pleuteri, the poster works with the idea of 'escaping from visual stereotypes.'
For his work Untitled (Snowdrops), 29-year-old De Pinto chose to forgo color altogether—relying only on black charcoal against a white background to depict a field of snowdrops, white flowers that bloom in late winter and early spring, often when there's still snow on the ground. It's captioned, 'Cracking the limit just like snowdrops crack cold ice.'
'[I compared] the figure of the para-athlete with the snowdrop, since it is a flower that breaks the ice and snow to blossom,' De Pinto said in an interview. 'It is a symbol of hope.'
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