Deported with his family to Siberia in 1940, he joined the Polish Armed Forces in the USSR in 1942, with whom he reached the Middle East. In Beirut, he became a student at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (L'Academie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts) and adopted the pseudonym Sygililla. He married the painter Maria Stravinska, also an art student. In July 1947, he participated in two exhibitions: L'Exposition des Jeunes Peintres Polonais Au Liban, 20-26 July, at the American University of Beirut (he showed his graduation works together with Stanislaw Frenkel and Jozef Galuba) and at the Beirut Academy (J.W. Sienkiewicz). Sygililla-Mazur also made his presence felt at the Polish School of Painting and Drawing in Beirut, run by Boleslaw Baake. "Already in his Beirut period, the stylistics of Mazur's canvases oscillated between the experience of Expressionist painting and the fascination with Cubism, with the use of Fauvist colouring." (J.W. Sienkiewicz). These qualities became established in his canvases after his arrival in Canada, where the artist arrived with his wife in 1949. Sygililla-Mazur worked as a technician-illustrator, taking up art in his free time. He practised oil painting, sculpture in wood, stone and metal and, from the early 1980s, also weaving, following an ancient weaving technique that allowed for free positioning of the warp and manipulation of the weft.

In the 1950s, the artist participated in exhibitions. In 1950, the Polish Scientific Institute organised the Exhibition of Polish Artists In Exile Residing in Canada, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Sygililla-Mazur showed two oil paintings. In 1951, the artist participated in the Exhibition of Slavonic Art at Montreal University, also shown at McGill University. In 1954, at the Redpath Museum at McGill University, PIN and KPK prepared a Polish Art Exhibition, in which Sygililla-Mazur showed seven works (exhibition flyer). In 1959, commissioned by the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, the artist made a bas-relief using the technique of forging and combining copper, white metal and brass.

From the early 1960s, the artist did not participate in exhibitions. It was only a few years after his death that Sygililla-Mazur's work appeared on the Internet. His neighbours, a young couple who presumably cared for the isolated artist, inherited his works and put them up for sale at an auction house in Albany, New York. Most of them were acquired in 2004 by major art galleries on Madison Avenue in New York, which sold out within a year. One of the collectors, American businessman James Halperin, owns 34 works by Zygmunt Sygililla-Mazur (twelve oils, the rest watercolours), and has posted a bio on the gallery's website explaining that the Polish artist, for fear of losing his privacy, did not want to show his works during his lifetime.

The work in the catalogue
Zygmunt Sygililla-Mazur, no title, watercolour, information in lower right corner: "17 V 1996, 1 IV 1996, 3T, 30 III 1996, Woven, signed [Sy]", from Pinterest. The work is an erotic fantasy, for which the painter was already known in Beirut. In Canada, the eroticism of Sygililla-Mazur's work was probably one of the reasons why the painter did not want to show his work in public. On the left we see the figure of a woman playing the guitar, on the right a green man gazing at her. The woman's face has exaggerated, monkey-like features: bulging eyes, large mouth and monkey nose. The guitar she is holding also forms part of her body. With her shaking leg, she embraces the green creature staring menacingly at her. Instead of a mouth, the deformed male figure has a sharp, blue tongue joined to a green hand. The work is in keeping with the stylistics of Expressionist painting and Cubism. The Fauvist palette - sharp greens, blues, yellows and browns - makes the artist's vision even more dreamlike.