In April 2019, Siniša Mačković posted a picture of his old Croatian passport to Instagram. The photo inside shows a boy of about six or seven in a white collar, looking straight at the camera and not smiling. “Who has ever been young before,” he wrote underneath. Croatians turned up in the comments to say hello. One wrote: ZAGREB.
Mačković directs Karma, a contemporary art gallery with spaces in New York, Los Angeles and Maine. He was 37 when he posted that photo, and a few months out from the paparazzi shots that would introduce him to the public as Chloë Sevigny’s boyfriend. The passport also gave up his birth date, August 21, 1981, which makes him 45. Sevigny is 51, close to seven years older.
Harper’s Bazaar later pointed back to that post as the reason anyone outside his own circle knows where he was born.
Table of Contents
Zagreb, Zaprešić, and a long way round
He was born in Zagreb while it was still part of Yugoslavia, a country that had dissolved before he finished school. Croatian outlets, including the Nova TV portal Dnevnik.hr and the magazine Story, report that he grew up in Zaprešić, a town on the edge of the capital, and that his family emigrated to Australia during his childhood. Both say he studied graphic design there before he moved to New York.
Why the family left, and exactly when, has never been reported.
That gap got filled in badly. Page Six, running one of the first pieces about him in January 2020, described him as Serbian and put his age at 33. Neither was right, and the nationality error was still being repeated by other outlets years later. His passport is Croatian, and he had already posted it.
Fifteen years at the same gallery
Brendan Dugan founded Karma in 2011 in a single East Village space. Mačković has been its director since that year, according to the LinkedIn profile cited by Page Six at the time, and he is still in the job.
He has been on the record about the work for a decade. Artsy quoted him in 2016 on the painter Walter Price, who had joined the Navy out of high school as a way to pay for art school. In 2019 he told The Art Newspaper what a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach costs a gallery Karma’s size once transport and accommodation are counted: “close to six figures.”
Asked by Cultured in 2022 how he handles artists, he rejected the idea that a dealer parents them. “I like working with artists even if they’re difficult to work with,” he said, describing himself as a partner rather than someone walking them across the street.
How he met Chloë Sevigny
Lizzi Bougatsos, the artist and Gang Gang Dance singer, spent months telling Sevigny about a man she knew from Karma before the two of them were in a room together.
That happened in 2018, at an afterparty following a Spencer Sweeney show at Gagosian. Sevigny has said they locked eyes and traded a few coy words, then ran into each other later the same night on a dance floor at a Karma party without speaking at all, until he asked whether he could see her sometime.
The first date was lunch at Souen. Afterwards they walked to the Morgan Library to see a Frankenstein exhibition, one of Sevigny’s favourite books as a child, and watched a Depeche Mode documentary.
A courthouse wedding, and a green card
They married at New York City Hall on Monday, March 9, 2020. Sevigny was pregnant and wore black. Nobody outside their circle knew for a year, until she posted a photograph on their first anniversary.
The timing was not only romantic. Sevigny told Vogue in 2022 that there was “also a green card situation” behind the date. Invitations for a full wedding were already at the printer when the pandemic closed everything down.
Their son, Vanja
Vanja Sevigny Mačković was born on May 2, 2020, at Mount Sinai East, eight weeks after his parents signed the papers.
The birth was hard. Sevigny told The Cut in 2024 that she was induced so she could be tested for COVID beforehand, that complications followed, and that Vanja spent time in the NICU. He is now six, goes to a Montessori school, and the family walks him there together when the schedule allows.
The wedding they had planned
It finally happened on May 15, 2022, at Talmadge Hill Community Church in Darien, Connecticut, where Sevigny grew up. There were 130 guests. Vanja, two years old, came down the aisle in a sailor outfit. Mačković wore black.
Their first dance was Björk’s “Cosmogony,” a song they had played over and over in a rented Connecticut house during the first months of lockdown with a newborn in the room.
What his wife says about him
The fullest description of Mačković as a person comes from Sevigny, in interviews about her own career.
She told The Cut that he handles the logistics of their household, that she is hopeless with email and cannot book her own plane ticket, and that he talks her down when she spirals about leaving their son for a job. “What’s so nice about my husband is he’s so competent,” she said. She has also said that becoming parents made the marriage stronger rather than harder.
Karma in 2026
The gallery has left the neighbourhood where it started. Its bookstore closed in April 2025, and the last East Village spaces went in June 2026, a departure noted by the local news site EV Grieve.
Karma now lists three addresses:
- 549 West 26th Street, Chelsea, around 10,000 square feet, open weekdays
- 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles
- 70 Main Street, Thomaston, Maine, open Friday to Sunday
Mačković still works the circuit on his own account. He was at the Frieze New York preview at The Shed in May 2024 without Sevigny. With her, he was photographed at the Emmys in September 2025 and at the after party for A24’s Marty Supreme premiere that December.
