Czech Informel represents a very short and precisely timed period and a narrow circle of artists, mostly students or recent graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts. According to Aleš Veselý, the common starting point was a rejection of painting and a leaning towards gestural-expressive abstraction. Strong influences were extra-artistic stimuli, such as the works of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, James Joyce or Ladislav Klíma, and the absurdist texts of Samuel Beckett, serial and punctual music (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki), electronic music by Edgard Varèse, as well as discoveries in physics and mathematics (Heisenberg, Wiener). Among foreign art, about which Czech artists had only fragmentary information, they felt a kinship with the Art brut of Jean Dubuffet. They knew Alberto Burri´s compositions of stitched jute sacks,Guggenheim museum: Alberto Burri the abstract relief textures of Jean FautrierWikiart: Jean Fautrier and Manolo Millares, material painting by Antoni Tàpies, metal reliefs by Zoltán Kemény, sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi, Lynn Chadwick and Kenneth Armitage. Inspiration also came from the environment of the neglected, dilapidated and greyish Prague houses and streets of the 1950s.Nešlehová M, The Reverse Face of Modernism, in: Judlová M, 1994, p. 192
