About Mago

Mago is a creative director, graphic artist and painter. Born in Chechnya, he fled to Cologne, Germany, with his family in 1994 due to the Russian invasion.His father started teaching him to draw at 10 years old but Mago’s thirst for creating art intensified after his father moved to Russia. Mago invested more time and effort into improving his painting, hoping to impress his father on his annual visits to Germany.At 12 years old Mago started creating surrealist digital art on computer programs. From a young age he was communicative and had already started building up a network thanks to his presence and activity on online art forums and in art collectives. After being showcased on creative networking platform, Behance, Mago was discovered by Nike at only 14 years old. This was the beginning of a stream of publicity, including appearances on popular TV shows TVtotal and SternTV as well as further documentaries on German television, all whilst he was at school.At 16 Mago left school and moved to Düsseldorf for a creative direction position at an animation agency. After two years he decided to leave the company and relocate to Berlin, yearning to be his own boss.In 2014 he went to New York for the first time to draw for Converse. This ignited a spark to travel more and to spend more time in New York. He started regularly attending major fashion weeks and building up his network. He has now been based in Berlin for 9 years but continues to spend months at a time in New York, working on collaborations with multiple classic sports brands such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok as well as limited drop collections for luxury brands such as Etro, Prada and Emilio Pucci.Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic Mago switched his focus to oil on canvas and is one of the few artists today that create both digital and analog artworks. His first solo exhibition in New York begins on 15th September.