A founding member of the group UB 12 and husband of the sculptor Věra Janoušková, the Czech sculptor and painter Vladimír Janoušek studied after World War II at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in the studio of Josef Wagner, graduating in 1950. The main influences on the formation of his sculptural style were particularly the late works of Otto Gutfreund, the exhibitions of west European art held in Prague before 1948, and the works of Henry Moore. His theoretical influences were particularly the ideas of Bohumil Kubišta and the lectures of Professor Václav Nebeský. In the 1950s Janoušek started to create sculptural portraits, reliefs and statues of a very high standard, intended for unique incorporation into architecture. He gradually abandoned classical sculptural materials, entirely replacing them with metal, which best suited his self-expression. In this way he produced sculptures in the 1960s in which the indefinite outlines of figures are contrasted with a firm geometrical structure. Subsequently an inter-active mobile element began to figure in his oeuvre, usually in the form of a pendulum. In his late phase Janoušek moved to spatial variability, so that his sculptures, constructed most frequently from plates of sheet aluminium connected with wing nuts in parallel layers, offered viewers the possibility of their own interpretation.