While many of the best movie posters are imprinted onto our collective conscience, ingenious new designs appear every year. The Marvel 'floating head' epidemic might make it seem as though creativity has long disappeared from the art of the poster design, but the last decade has given us some classics – including this incredible design for 2019's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Love the fiery poster has recently been, er, rekindled on Reddit, where users are gushing over the seemingly minimal design's beautiful brush strokes, and ingenious use of negative space.
The poster was designed by Akiko Stehrenberger, whose bold posters for films like Funny Games and Honey Boy tend to offer something bolder and altogether more unusual than the films' standard one-sheets. As she put it, she is often brought on when “a studio wants a less conventional poster and more often than not, a secondary poster where they can take a bit more of a risk.”
The poster for Portrait of a Lady on Fire not only depicts a bright burning flame, but also features, very subtly in the black negative space, two faces about to kiss. "This is soo cool, the thick brush strokes, the negative space that ties it all together. So tactile. Just bursts in my brain," one Redditor comments.
This isn't the first of Stehrenberger's posters we've featured over the last few years. Back in 2023, we were seriously impressed with her poster for Netflix's Beef, which captured the themes of the show with swagger.
