Zbyšek Sion

Zbyšek Sion (born 12 April 1938, Polička) is a Czech painter and printmaker, a co-founder of Czech structural abstraction art. His later works were mostly imaginative and illusionistic paintings, often on general warning theme or bearing a strong political symbolism.

Life

Zbyšek Sion had a dramatic childhood, personally witnessing the horrors of World War II. In 1944 his father, who had been arrested by the Gestapo at the start of the war, died in a German prison. 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.

When Sion was growing up, his cousin Otokar Aleš Kukla, an art historian and director of Polička Museum, would lend him books on art.

In 1953 Sion began studying at the School of Applied Arts in Brno, where he became friends with another painter, Antonín Tomalík. In 1957 Sion and Tomalík commenced a preparatory year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, taught by Jaroslav Vodrážka. From 1958 to 1964 he studied at the Academy under Karel Souček and Jiří Horník, but as was the case with the entire generation of his contemporaries at the Academy, extracurricular activities and contacts with members of the future ''Confrontations group'' proved to be more significant for Sion's development as a painter than his studies. At a party at the Academy on Saint Nicholas Eve 1958, featuring ''The Šmidras'', Sion met the group's members (Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepraš, Bedřich Dlouhý), and later, in 1960, he met Vladimír Boudník, Robert Piesen and Mikuláš Medek, all key figures in Czech post-war abstract art.

Zbyšek Sion and Antonín Tomalík were both included in ''Confrontations II'', a private one-day exhibition held in Aleš Veselý’s studio. Artists appearing in unofficial exhibitions risked being expelled from their studies, which was why the organisers of the first structural abstraction exhibitions in Warsaw (1962) and at Nová síň in Prague (''Exhibition D'', 1963) did not invite students to participate. By the time Sion took part in the ''Confrontations III'' exhibition, held in Prague in 1965, he had moved away from Art Informel in favour of a very different form of expression.

Sion’s first solo exhibition was in Ústí nad Orlicí in 1966, followed a year later by exhibitions at Divadlo za branou in Prague and the Regional Gallery in Liberec. In the 1960s he took part in major exhibitions of Czech modern art, both within Czechoslovakia (the AICA congress, Phases) and abroad (Lignano, Turin, Dortmund, Paris).

In 1958–1962 Zbyšek Sion was one of the founders of a group that later became known as ''The Crusaders’ School of Pure Humour Without a Joke'' (together with Zdeněk Beran, Antonín Tomalík and Antonín Málek). After 1967 the group moved its base from one pub (''U Křižovníků'') to another (''U Svitáků''). The group played an important role during the normalization era leading up to the founding of Charter 77. 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). He had no further solo exhibitions in Czechoslovakia until 1990, but he was included in several collective exhibitions abroad (Düsseldorf, Padua, Konstanz) and at regional galleries. In 1973 and 1977 he held private exhibitions for his friends in his cellar studio in Vinohrady in Prague.

After Velvet Revolution in 1989, Sion was appointed associate professor in the painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts. He took part in a symposium on Art Informel (1991) and was featured at the exhibition ''Czech Art Informel: Pioneers of Abstraction 1957–1964''. In 1993 he had retrospective exhibitions in Roudnice nad Labem, The Václav Špála Gallery in Prague and the Ostrava House of Art. In 1996 Sion had another retrospective at the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague.

Zbyšek Sion lives and works in Polička.

Work

Zbyšek Sion’s paintings convey an existential sense of tragedy with a coarse and even cruel grotesqueness.Antonín Hartmann: Zbyšek Sion, Obrazy 1958–1996, Galerie Rudolfinum, Praha 1966

Literature has always been an important inspiration for Sion. Before commencing at the Academy of Fine Arts he had read Strindberg and Kafka, and he had begun illustrating Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. At the Academy the young undergraduates were attracted to chiaroscuro Baroque painting

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