Anastasia Temirkhan — Where ideas run free & wild
artist
Anastasia Temirkhan
A circle, reduced far enough, can stand in for an entire opera season; a line can become a waterfall. Anastasia Temirkhan, based in Lugano, builds posters, identities and creative direction for cultural institutions, coffee roasters and record labels across Europe, the Middle East and South Korea out of exactly that kind of compression. The reach of the idea shows in a recent commission for Hamburg's Thalia Theatre production of “Legend,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, its imagery drawn from Sergei Parajanov's film “The Colour of Pomegranates”: proof that reduction travels well past a festival identity and onto a European stage.
She trained at the Bankov Poster School in Prague under Peter Bankov, counts Anna Kulachek and Mikhail Lychkovskiy among her mentors, and went on to Dafi Kühne's Typographic Printing Program, a Weltformat Festival workshop, a Design Summer in Hangzhou and an AGI Congress in Basel. The work has since collected Graphis Platinum awards, Poster Stellars gold and silver medals, five Excellent Work selections at TDC Tokyo, a Golden Bee selection, a bronze at the Nanjing poster biennial, and multiple 100 Best Posters selections across Switzerland, Germany and Austria, with features in Design 360°, Bold Journey and People of Print; in 2025 she lectured at ESAD Porto's Semantic Shapes Conference.
In 2025 she co-organised, with Mikhail Lychkovskiy, the Bankov Poster School's fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square, contributing “Where ideas run free & wild” with motion designer Enrico Gisana — since awarded a Communication Arts Award of Excellence. “Being a designer means living in a state of continuous voyage,” she has said. “Creative work at its best is a dialogue: between mentors, collaborators, viewers, cultures and ideas.”
Why we like it: even blown up forty feet over Times Square, her instinct to reduce first and let the pattern argue its own case still holds.
