(1935–2015) While still a student at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts during the years 1952−1958, Aleš Veselý came to know many of his future close colleagues, with whom he would take part in the Prague Confrontations. His first works date back to the end of the 1950s when he created phantasmagorical, expressively existential pictures. In addition to painting, drawing and graphics, he started in 1959 to create assemblages and objects whose brutally spontaneous concept of material would be characteristic of the Czech contribution to European art informel, which manifested itself in 1960 at the so-called Confrontations I and II. The second was held in Aleš Veselý’s studio. A series of stigmatising objects with thorns and spikes are covered with fissures that resemble open wounds, as if they have undergone some kind of painful process to spiritualise the material and thereby create a precious relic. Welded sculptures began to appear in his oeuvre in which the expressive urgency of destroyed material continues to have an effect. That phase reached its apex in the period 1967−1968 with the monumental sculpture Kaddish that was created at the Symposium of Spatial Forms in Ostrava. Aleš Veselý already had an international reputation but everything changed in 1968.