Mark Maggiori Just Sold a Painting for $1.3 Million. Is It the Most Expensive by a Living Artist?

A painting of buffalo beneath a sky that looks ready to swallow the mountains just sold for $1.3 million.

On September 18, 2026, Mark Maggiori’s The Prophecy led Rise of the Western Lights, his solo auction presented by Jackson Hole Art Auction in partnership with Far West at the Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyoming. The 31 results listed in the auction catalog add up to $9,317,500. More than nine million dollars in one evening, across paintings and works on paper.

What Makes Maggiori’s Night Remarkable

The price is nearly four times the $332,750 fetched by Morning Above the Canyon at Coeur d’Alene in 2023, the previous auction benchmark cited in reporting on the new record. The Prophecy also cleared its $300,000–$500,000 estimate by a considerable distance. The lot’s published conditions list a 0% buyer’s premium, so there is no auction-house premium to add to that $1.3 million figure.

Look at where the work happens. The buffalo occupy a narrow strip of land at the bottom. Almost everything above them is atmosphere: dark mountains, deep shadow, and warm light breaking through a mass of cloud. The sky carries the drama. The animals give it scale.

That is what makes this more interesting than a price announcement. A contemporary painter working with the landscape and imagery of the American West brought a room to a seven-figure result. And it was not one isolated bid: Life Is a Bronc sold for $850,000 and All Star West for $800,000 in the same sale.

So, Is It the Most Expensive Painting by a Living Artist?

No. The painting auction record is $90,312,500, paid for David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in 2018. Maggiori’s result is a major personal milestone, but the upper end of this category sits tens of millions of dollars higher.

For this countdown, “living artist” means the artist was alive when the work sold. Prices are nominal U.S. dollars, without adjusting for inflation. The Christie’s results include buyer’s premiums; the charity-auction result is the organizer’s reported total. Private sales, sculpture, and NFTs are outside the list.

That last distinction matters. Jeff Koons’s Rabbit sold for $91,075,000 in 2019, but it is a stainless-steel sculpture. We are looking at paintings.

5. David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott — $49.45 Million

Sold: March 6, 2019, Christie’s London, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction.
Price: £37,661,250, or $49,449,221 using the auction house’s published conversion, including buyer’s premium.

A pink sofa takes up the center of the room. Curator Henry Geldzahler sits facing us; his partner, Christopher Scott, stands to the right in a coat. The room is orderly, but the relationship between the figures keeps the picture from feeling settled.

This is one of Hockney’s major double portraits, offered from the collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. It brings together an important subject, a celebrated series, and a distinguished ownership and exhibition history. Those are concrete reasons collectors would compete for this particular Hockney.

The scale matters, too: an intimate domestic scene becomes a painting big enough to hold your attention across a room.

Sources: official sale results and collection history.

4. Ed Ruscha, Hurting the Word Radio #2 — $52.49 Million

Sold: November 13, 2019, Christie’s New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
Price: $52,485,000, including buyer’s premium.

Five yellow letters on blue. Then you notice the clamps.

Ruscha paints the word RADIO as something physical enough to squeeze and distort. It has the immediate readability of a billboard and the strange internal logic of a dream. The lettering looks clean; what is happening to it is not.

The painting comes from 1964, early in the development of Ruscha’s word paintings. Joan and Jack Quinn acquired it in the early 1970s and kept it for decades. Its appearance at auction offered collectors an early example of a body of work that helped establish his place in American art. The result set his auction record at the time.

Source: Christie’s sale report and painting history.

3. Sacha Jafri, The Journey of Humanity — $62 Million

Sold: March 22, 2021, Humanity Inspired charity auction at Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai.
Price: $62 million, as reported by the event organizer and Dubai’s Government Media Office.

This entry needs its own explanation. Jafri created the enormous painting during the pandemic at Atlantis, The Palm. It was intended to be offered in 70 lots. Buyer Andre Abdoune instead acquired the entire work, keeping the sections together.

The sale supported an initiative benefiting children through education, connectivity, healthcare, and sanitation. Its charitable purpose and extraordinary scale are part of the story of the price. It belongs in a discussion of major painting sales, but it is a different kind of event from a collector consigning a single canvas to Christie’s.

Here, the work and the fundraising project are inseparable. A $62 million charitable purchase should not be read as a routine market price for Jafri’s other paintings.

Source: Government of Dubai Media Office announcement.

2. Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half — $68.26 Million

Sold: November 19, 2024, Christie’s New York, 20th Century Evening Sale.
Price: $68,260,000, including buyer’s premium.

There is a Western in this painting, too. Look in the upper-right corner.

The gas station dominates: hard diagonals, red and white architecture, blue sky, and the enormous STANDARD sign. A torn Western publication hangs above it, almost absurdly small. Ruscha gives the roadside stop the presence of a monument.

It is a useful companion to Maggiori. Both paintings work with images of the American West, but one finds its scale in sky and buffalo while the other finds it beside the highway.

The painting was a centerpiece of Ruscha’s Now / Then retrospective at MoMA and LACMA before the sale. Its importance within his early work, museum exposure, and monumental size help explain the attention it attracted. The result surpassed his 2019 record.

Sources: sale price and background and lot catalog.

1. David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) — $90.31 Million

Sold: November 15, 2018, Christie’s New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
Price: $90,312,500, including buyer’s premium.

A swimmer moves beneath the surface. A man in a pink jacket looks down from the pool’s edge. Beyond them, green hills close around the scene.

The water gives Hockney a painting problem: how to make a flat surface show depth, distortion, and movement. The two figures give it an emotional one. They occupy the same scene but seem to exist in separate worlds.

The picture combines two of his best-known subjects, swimming pools and double portraits. It had also appeared in the major retrospective that traveled from Tate Britain to Paris and New York in 2017–18. This was a widely recognized painting with a substantial exhibition history, not an unfamiliar work suddenly discovered on auction night.

At roughly 69 times Maggiori’s $1.3 million result, it puts the size of the global painting record into perspective.

Sources: Christie’s painting history and result and Guinness World Records.

Back to That Sky

None of this makes Maggiori’s night smaller.

More than $9.3 million across a solo auction is an extraordinary response to the work. It tells us something specific about demand for Maggiori, even if one evening cannot tell us where the whole Western art market is headed.

What connects these paintings is how clearly each artist has decided what deserves attention. A cloud. A person on a sofa. A word. A gas station. The subjects are familiar. The decisions that turn them into paintings are individual.

You do not need an auction paddle to have an opinion about them. Start with the image. Stay with the one that makes you look twice.

If this has you looking more closely at landscape painting, read about what a small Yellowstone study forces a painter to see, or browse the original works in the studio.

Prices and records researched September 21, 2026. The countdown ranks the five sales discussed here by their reported dollar totals, including the separately identified charity auction. Sale circumstances help explain collector interest; they do not establish any individual bidder’s motive.