The Hyper Realistic Marc Sijan

As a young artist Marc Sijan shared projects with legendary Duane Hanson to develop finishing techniques that they both incorporated into their sculptures. Sijan has elevated to pre-eminence in a golden age of hyper realistic sculpture. Hailed as the successor to Hanson as Master of the genre. Sijan is the only artist to have worked with Hanson.

There is a gritty realism that conveys the humanism that we see in Marc Sijan's pieces.Yet there is also obviously a very mystical quality expressing religious undertones or overtones. None of this would be effective without the technical mastery we see in all the sculptures.

Brady Roberts Chief Curator, MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM

People often have been fooled by Sijan's work. His “security guard" sculpture sits in the lobby of the Milwaukee Bucks practice facility, where it once frustrated Michael Jordan by its lack of conversation that he complained to management. ESPN

Marc Sijan is following the primal compulsion of people to create images that reflect a respectful perspective on themselves, a practice that began some 17 thousand years ago. Humans started portraying their own image on the walls of caves in northern Spain, resulting in some of the most remarkable art ever conceived. Even Picasso was impressed, observing that this was the beginning of the development of recreating the figure, although on flat two-dimensional surfaces. These instincts continued to develop over thousands of years, until the skills of drawing and painting were finally harnessed and put down on woven material or Pompeian plaster walls. But it was a true adventurer who took up the challenge of translating the human form into recognizable, three-dimensional context. View his website: http://www.marcsijan.com/