Christo Coetzee was a South African assemblage and Neo-Baroque artist closely associated with the avant-garde art movements of Europe and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the influence of art theorist Michel Tapié, art dealer Rodolphe Stadler and art collector and photographer Anthony Denney, as well as the Gutai group of Japan, he developed his oeuvre alongside those of artists strongly influenced by Tapié's Un Art Autre (1952), such as Georges Mathieu, Alfred Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies and Lucio Fontana.

The Gutai Art Association was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. It operated until shortly after Yoshihara's death in 1972.