During the war Sion saw a drawing of an idyllic landscape by a local painter, Josef Václav Síla, that had been splattered with a German soldier’s brains in an exchange of fire with partisans, and this proved to be another formative experience.

In the 1960s he took part in major exhibitions of Czech modern art, both within Czechoslovakia (the AICA congress, Phases)[3] and abroad (Lignano,[4] Turin, Dortmund, Paris).

Sion’s employment during the normalisation years included a brief period operating a water pump for an engineering geology company, Stavební geologie Praha (1974–1975).

Sion’s early drawings from his student years were dominated by black, and besides pub scenes his most frequent motifs were skulls, crucifixes and melancholic and introverted self-portraits (“I was Hamlet... at that age, who wasn’t?”).

At the end of 1959 Sion began creating non-representational compositions, gestural drawings and pastose gouaches dominated by black (Untitled; Visitor; Dream about Venice).

In 1960 Jiří Kolář and Mikuláš Medek viewed a selection of private works that Sion had created while dwelling at the dormitory of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

By the time of his first solo exhibition (1966) in Ústí nad Orlicí, Zbyšek Sion had presented himself as a painter of fantastical monsters and apocalyptic visions (The Fall of the Tower, 1966).

Following the August 1968 occupation the titles of Sion’s painting cycles became an unambiguous testimony to his emotions (Treacherous Friend, 1968; Uninvited Guest, 1968; Situation – How to Make Behave with a Stick, 1969; Fugitive, 1969).

Sion’s paintings from the 1980s were increasingly inspired by the contemporary world, transforming profane reality into pitiless morality plays (The Three Graces, 1980; Thrilling Finish, 1980; Reconstruction of a Head, 1981; Bubbles, 1981–1982).

[8] According to Petr Nedoma, the director of Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague, Zbyšek Sion has in his work consistently examined the ethical question of how the individual should behave when placed against his will in a world whose reality he is unwilling and perhaps unable to accept.

He can only raise such pressing questions and reply to them truthfully in his work, in which hidden and suppressed obsessions and anxieties have given rise to a constant flow of fantastical and imaginative images, allegorical allusions and rich metaphors, creating his own communication code.