Philipp Mager comes from Cologne and also went to school there. After leaving school, he completed a two-year traineeship at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. From 1990-1997 he studied painting and graphic art at the Berlin University of the Arts. He now lives and works in Berlin.

Philipp Mager is actually or mainly a painter, but he also frequently works in woodcut. In earlier creative periods, Mager often worked with collage, which may have had and still has an influence on his painting and also on the way he depicts his woodcuts: the elements depicted come from different sources, there are disparate proportions, different spatial references and also different degrees of reality within one picture. At the same time, there are echoes of various trends in art history, such as New Objectivity and comics.

“First of all, the black, which is printed first and lies underneath the entire depiction, is constitutive for the pictorial effect. It lends depth to the colours, creates clear boundaries between the coloured areas and enlivens them by flashing up here and there. There are also ingenious colour gradients applied to the printing blocks, reminiscent of the legendary ‘bokashi’ in Japanese woodblock prints. These emphasise the volume of individual objects […] and generally underline the very painterly impression of the print. As for many other contemporary artists, for Philipp Mager the possibility of reproduction inherent in letterpress printing is irrelevant.

Rather, it is the decelerated creative process and the manual challenge of cutting and printing that appeals to him and others of his generation in woodcutting. And, as for many of his colleagues, it makes no sense for him to repeat the very time-consuming printing process more often”. (Kunstmuseum Spendhaus Reutlingen, 2017, published in Südwestpresse)