Call it the Maggiori Effect.
When events are announced—phone lines are tied up, websites go down, once-quiet Instagram pages light up. When he appears—lines form, selfies are taken, security is needed. When art is available—bidders go into a frenzy, ballot boxes are full, prices soar. Chaos, albeit organized chaos, follows him wherever he goes.
In just 12 years, Mark Maggiori has gone from an obscure French musician living in the remote Arizona desert to the reigning superstar of Western art. And there are no signs he’s going to slow down.
Lord of the West, oil on linen, 52 x 45 in.
“I’ve been on the road for a week now, in Wyoming and Montana. I’ve never been recognized so much,” he says. “Every place, no matter how remote, there is someone who calls out to me. I was at breakfast near Yellowstone, and this guy in a truck pulled up right near me in front of the restaurant. He just wanted to say hello. All kinds of people, they reach out and stop me because they want to tell me that my work touches the American heart and soul. You don’t realize how many people are collecting your work until you start meeting all of them. It’s been amazing and has really blown me away.”
Mathó, oil on panel, 26 x 39 in.
Maggiori was in the Mountain West this summer to photograph cowboys and other Western subjects for his next body of work. He hadn’t yet released the current body of work. “I’m already done on that one,” he says. “I’m already in the future.”
For everyone else, all eyes are on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Maggiori will unveil his newest show on September 18. He’s presenting the work alongside the Jackson Hole Art Auction, which is being held the next day. Rise of the Western Lights will feature at least 30 new paintings and drawings, every single one available via live auction, a first for the artist.
“The title came about because when I do these photoshoots and get this material, it always starts in the morning, often very early. The rise of the day is such an important moment. And I’m always out there when the light is rising for the first time. It rises in from the east, but it lights the west and my experience I’m going through,” the artist says. “It’s an awakening moment that happens. It’s a big picture—a whole movement that is a renewal in Western art.”
Journey to Blue Waters, oil on canvas, 48 x 49 in.
Maggiori is referring generally to contemporary Western art—“New West” if you prefer that term—and more specifically to the community of fans, artists and collectors who have sprung up around him. They see Maggiori as not only a fascinating artist and public figure, but as the shining star has guideed fresh faces into Western culture, one cowboy hat at a time.
“For me, this all started 10 years ago when I was a younger guy, but the movement is bigger now. People are following in the footsteps of what we’re doing, which is funny for me because I’m still very much an outsider,” he says. “I don’t like to do the same things that other people do. I take my own path.”
Texas Blood, oil on panel, 40 x 40 in.
“Mark Maggiori as outsider” is not that farfetched for anyone who has followed his career. He is an outsider in almost every facet of the word. For starters, he’s French, which isn’t entirely without precedent in Western art—see Jules Tavernier, Henry Farny or Rosa Bonheur, all born in the 1800s—yet is still somewhat rare. He comes to art from a music background, although not from within country music as one would expect but from his band Pleymo, which has roots in metal and the rock-rap hybrids of the late ’90s. He’s also quite nomadic, working in Los Angeles; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Taos, New Mexico, and drawing from each of those locations to inspire his paintings. Even his career has been somewhat itinerant, with shows at Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Trailside Galleries, Legacy Gallery and then his own Far West group show that has held events in Los Angeles, New York City and Austin, Texas. He’s only shown at the same place more than once a few times. If there is a roadmap for success in Western art, Maggiori’s career path has bypassed many of the traditional landmarks.
Instead, the artist has blazed his own trail with an unconventional exhibition schedule, a relentless social media presence that he personally curates and shoots, regular “print drops” of high-quality reproductions, and by appealing to collectors who frequently originate from outside the normal show and event circuit that keeps the Western art market humming throughout the year.
Mark Maggiori in his Arizona studio with Seek and You Shall Rise on his easel. Image courtesy the artist.
His unequivocal success and his persistent presence on social media have made him a target of more traditional Western enthusiasts, older collectors who feel his sudden fame was unearned and even fellow artists who either see his work as formulaic or copy his style for themselves. Maggiori shrugs it off, as he has for years. “If someone thinks that any one person can corrupt Western art, then maybe the problem is with them and not with Western art or me,” he says. “I just want to paint.”
When it comes to painting, Maggiori believes that work begins outside of the studio, which is what brought him to Montana and Wyoming this summer. “I gather more material than I use. It represents only a fraction of what I’m doing. But being out there and keeping those moments and emotions alive for my work, that’s what I want to experience. That’s how the West should be experienced,” he says. “To keep work fresh on the easel, you have to have those special moments. If you spend your life behind an easel, it will show in your work. It’s going to be stale. So, I get back out there to accumulate experiences to bring back with me to the studio. Art should be passion, not a chore.”
The Prophecy, oil on canvas, 45 x 70 in.
When he’s in the studio, he lets the emotion of the experience wash over him. “I see a lot of people taking shortcuts, and I think that’s the biggest threat to new and young artists. There are no shortcuts, whether it’s my work or Logan [Maxwell Hagege’s] work or others—no matter the artist,” he says. “Painting is about emotion. That is the most important part.”
Other painters work and think like Maggiori does. He didn’t invent any of this. But, like so much that involves the artist, the sheer scale of his methods is what makes his perspective so compelling. Consider his photoshoots. He pays his models, but he could easily have a small army of willing cowboys if he held an open-casting call. They all want to be immortalized in his work. And the shoots themselves are more like high-end commercial sets than ragtag model sessions in the desert. Or consider his Instagram, which hovers close to 1 million followers when most Western artists are still under 50,000. Even the Jackson Hole show seems to be reaching mythic proportions, with tickets selling out moments after becoming available and crowds expected to be in the thousands. Rumors have already started to swirl about celebrities and billionaire collectors attending. Maggiori has no comment, except to say, “There will be some surprising people in attendance.” All of this, and there is a lot, adds to the mystique of his persona and his studio.
As for the stakes of the show, they remain high, but Maggiori seems unfazed. His last show, the March 2023 solo show at Legacy Gallery, sold out to the tune of $3 million. Not only was the show a record breaker for Western art, it also outsold that year’s Prix de West, the Cowboy Artists of America show and the combined sales of Legacy’s previous two record holders, the 2020 John Coleman show and a 2017 Martin Grelle show. Since Rise of the Western Lightswill be sold entirely by live auction, Maggiori won’t even be competing with his 2023 sale, which was offered to buyers via a fixed-price box draw with a handful of auction pieces. “The auction component was part of a long conversation,” the artist says of this year’s event. “I wanted to give more people a chance to own the work with a fixed-price draw, but the more we talked about it the more an auction was the way to do it. It’s going to be unique for me, and for a solo show. I come from music, so the event is part of the fun. I don’t want people just quietly talking in front of the work. That’s not me. I want people to come and participate. It’s going to be a crazy show. And we’re really leaning into the format.”
Independence, oil on linen, 37 x 60 in.
The sale includes works that speak to Maggiori’s painting style—luscious golden-hour color, celestial cloudscapes and epic canyon vistas—but he also branches out by including more wildlife paintings, interior forest scenes and a suite of elk drawings. “This is a body of work spread over two-and-a-half years of preparation. I will be very excited to walk into the room and see them all together. I can’t actually imagine it in my head, but I really want to see the evolution of the pieces as they hang on the wall,” he says. “I’ve been bringing wildlife into my work more because that is part of being in the West. I’ve stumbled into it more and more. I’m not a wildlife artist because that’s not true to who I am, but I am painting wildlife because it is a major part of the American West.”
The Power, oil on linen panel, 32 x 27 in.
He notes that this show also has strong connections to his human subjects, including his Native American figures and the models that inspired him. “The DNA of my painting is here. It’s clouds and cowboys, but there is also a strong collaboration with Native Americans,” Maggiori says. He points to the largest work in the show, The Prophecy, which shows bison under magnificent clouds. “There is a Native American prophecy about the white buffalo. They say that the white buffalo will come back and they will roam again as they are supposed to. There was something that was very strong for me within that story. I connected with it for this painting.” Other Native American paintings include Call of the Ancestors, Forest of Gold and The Power.
Another new piece is Mathó, which shows a bear within a moody and atmospheric forest scene. It’s unlike anything Maggiori has ever painted. The work calls back to his past. “I grew up in the forest in Fontainebleau, France. It was interesting when I arrived to the American West because I got to see those painted skies. It was the first thing I noticed,” he says. “But after 10 years painting, I wanted to paint a different environment and a more personal painting. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a picture of Ivin Shishkin’s painting of bears in a forest, [Morning in a Pine Forest]. My grandpa gave it to my grandma. He was Russian so he loved that painting. I went to Russia in 2018 and saw the painting in person. It became very important for me to do my own version of it. There is a link to my life. That’s how Mathó came to be.”
Other major pieces include Life as a Bronc, a bucking horse painting; Independence, a large landscape painting with his iconic clouds and horses; a nocturne canyon piece titled Lord of the West; and several classic cowboy paintings, including Texas Blood, Seek and You Shall Rise and All Star West.
Master of Dreams, oil on linen, 35 x 38 in.
Kevin Doyle, the managing director of the Jackson Hole Art Auction, has been working with Maggiori in the lead-up to Rise of the Western Lights. He knew he was grabbing a bull by the horns when the auction house signed up for the show, but admits he wasn’t quite prepared for the full experience of hosting a Maggiori show. In fairness, there’s simply no equivalent in the Western art world.
“When tickets went on sale in March, it crashed the website. That was the first indicator. The second was our phones were ringing off the hook. Then our emails were blasted with inquiries,” Doyle says. “The man is a full presence. He’s tall and looks like a movie star. Everybody wants to know what he’s doing and what he’s working on. But what’s really interesting with Mark is that he cares about his fans and his collectors. He wants to connect with them and share his vision. He is the new generation of top-tier Western painters who is looking into the future. And he’s authentic. He’s out there doing it. He was recently up here in Jackson doing a photoshoot and working with cowboys and Native American models. That part of what he does is important to him. A lot has been said about how he is the future, but he also works the way he does to pay respect to the Western artists who came before him. He wants to carry their torch forward.”
Seek and You Shall Rise, oil on linen panel, 42 x 60 in.
Doyle doesn’t want to speculate too much on the outcome of the show, but he notes the show will certainly go down as the can’t-miss show of the season, if not the whole year. “Just the wildlife aspect alone is important, especially here in Jackson, which is the home of the National Museum of Wildlife Art,” he says. “Mark is smart because he knows the passion that people have with wildlife art in this region. He has these remarkable wildlife pieces, but also these really special pieces that are pure Mark Maggiori.”
The September 18 VIP auction is sold out, but Doyle notes there is a waiting list that may—he stresses may—open up depending on attendance during the sale. For anyone who does not have tickets, they are encouraged to watch the show online through the Jackson Hole Art Auction platform. Not only will they be able to view the sale, they will be able to bid on the works. The show will open to the general public on September 19, although expect lines and waits to get inside.
For Maggiori, not only will he be ringmaster at the show, he wants to have a dialogue with visitors about his new pieces. He refers back to his musical past, and how music is meant to make a visceral connection with listeners. He wants to make those connections with his fans, and even his skeptical critics, as they experience the new paintings.
“My paintings are about the stories of the West, and how I feel about these people and places,” he says. “My emotions are in the paint. In the sunrises. In the horses and the people and the animals in the paintings. These are the emotions that prove we are alive.” —
Mark Maggiori: Rise of the Western Lights
September 18-19, 2026
Jackson Hole Center for the Arts
240 S. Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, WY 83001, (307) 734-9739
www.jacksonholeartauction.com
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