Jan Švankmajer is a Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, he created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová.

Czech Informel is described as a current of expressive structural abstraction that emerged from specific local conditions at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. It radically defined itself against all contemporary production and compromised creation and aestheticization of official art and became a turning point in the history of Czech art. Foreign critics appreciated the uniqueness of the works and wrote about a strong revolt of about thirty desperate avant-garde artists, which had no predecessor in Czechoslovakia. The term "informel" was used from 1945 by the French critic Waldemar-George and taken up and claimed by the painter Michel Tapié in the very title of the exhibition Signifiants de l´informel staged in Paul Facchetti´s studio in 1951. With international informel, which in Enrico Crispolti's conception includes a very heterogeneous group of artistic forms ranging from tachism to lyrical abstraction, is the Czech informel related only by some creative techniques.