Marc Sijan

Marc Sijan is a hyperrealist sculptor of the human figure whose work is found in galleries, museums and special exhibitions around the world and is especially well known in cities across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Born in 1946 and of Serbian descent, he grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he attended Bay View High School and loved sports. He went to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater intending to become a teacher and had never considered sculpture until, in his twenties, a class on teaching art drew him first to art and then specifically to sculpture, so much so that he switched his major. He later earned an advanced degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

His studio sits on a small side street in Milwaukee's Bay View neighborhood, deliberately off the beaten path, because quiet and solitude are essential to the concentration his work demands. He works on several pieces at once and spends from six months to a year completing a single sculpture, working every day of the week. The studio holds dozens of life-sized figures, standing, sitting, curled into boxes or lying on the floor, and each has its own story. Sijan never sculpts anyone without the person's permission; one figure, an aged beggar lying on a tattered mat with his hand out, grew from a chance meeting in an African village marketplace and long conversations about the man's life.

Rather than idealized beauty, his subjects span the whole range of humanity: scrawny and obese, old and young, weak and burly, with only a few conventionally attractive figures among them. Like a good writer, he tells stories not only of the rich and famous but of every facet of life. The realism extends to every wrinkle, hair, vein and blemish, the color and texture of skin and hair, details that even a good photograph would not reveal. Two of his security guard figures, one in the lobby of the Milwaukee Bucks Training Center, given to the team by the collector Senator Herb Kohl and wearing a name tag reading "Art", the other in the lobby of the Wisconsin Center, routinely fool visitors, who greet them and reach out to wake them.

Sijan has had more than sixty one-man museum exhibitions, and his work has been shown at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum. An art magazine ranking of the top twenty hyperrealist sculptors moved him from second to first in the world, and he has been honored as one of the most prominent Serbian Americans. Critics have placed him in the line of Duane Hanson and John De Andrea: Bruce Helander has called him one of the most successful and innovative artists in the world, Louis Zona of the Butler Institute of American Art has said his sculptures deserve to be included with the best narrative art of the modern era, and James Auer of the Milwaukee Journal wrote that his almost too believable imagery is the stuff magic is made of. A very private man who rarely talks about himself, he is married to Patricia, his staunchest supporter.