Marc Sijan (b. 1946) American, Plaster of Paris Female Sculpture. The woman has her eyes closed and her hair covered, with her body roughly ending just at the level of her breasts. The back is open and unfinished and has been modified to hang from a wall, with a plaque that contains attribution and origin. Signed in pen above it, along with the date 1996 and a title: "Girl in Arched Mirror." The mirror is missing from the sculpture. 

Size: 10 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 19 in. 

#4519 . 

Marc Sijan was born in Wisconsin in 1946, the son of Serbian immigrants. As a youth he had intense focus issues, which he was able to overcome by channeling his energy into mathematics, becoming particularly adept at geometry. He earned a teaching degree from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, but during his advanced studies he happened to take a class on teaching art, which gradually became his primary interest. He enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and came to concentrate on drawing, then painting, and finally sculpture, earning his Masters of Science in Art in 1971. After marrying his wife Patricia the following year he traveled to study under Duane Hanson, one of the key innovators in hyperrealistic figural sculptures. Within a decade Sijan was acknowledged as one of the foremost sculptors of his generation, taking six months to a year to work on a single piece, although often jumping between ten or more different works at once. He began by taking photographs of people, as well as obtaining written permission to craft their likenesses through sculptural casting, not using studio models but rather average passersby on the streets of Wisconsin and in his travels around the world. He then worked first with plaster and later with synthetic materials like resin and Bondo putty to craft incredibly life-like, anatomically precise figures, finishing with twenty-five coats of paint and then varnish. Sijan has had over seventy solo exhibitions around the world since the 1980s, and his security guard series routinely fools visitors to the Milwaukee Bucks Training Center as they are posed throughout the facility. His works can be seen in the Smithsonian Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, although most of his pieces are found in private collections in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, rather than his home country. Sijan continues to live and work in Milwaukee, sculpting seven days a week even into his late seventies.