A year later, at Professor Holý's request, Dlouhý was allowed to return to the Academy, and finished his studies in Karel Souček's studio (1959).

In the dangerous years of Stalinist repression in the 1950s, Bedřich Dlouhý and his friends from the Šmidra group[1] organised various non-art and pataphysical projects such as the Malmuzherciáda exhibition (1954), a collective absurdist novel called Moroa – A Tale of Great Woe, starting their own brass band and the Palette of the Motherland Ice Hockey Club (1962),[2] a production of the play The Incendiary's Daughter, and a special event at the Reduta jazz club to commemorate the naïve poet Václav Svoboda Plumlovský, while during their mandatory Marxism lessons at the Academy they would draw humorous pictures.

In 1965 Dlouhý was awarded one of the six main prizes at the IVe Biennale Internationale des Jeunes Artistes de Paris, allowing him to spend half a year studying in France.

[5] On his 50th birthday in 1983 he had his first opportunity to show his work in Prague, at Vincenc Kramář Gallery; the exhibition broke visitor records and was widely reviewed in the press.

[9] The 1950s left their mark on Bedřich Dlouhý's drawings from the Academy and his early paintings, which have a specific and bleak sense of humour and an aesthetic that defined itself in opposition not to official art (which he thought ridiculous and unworthy of attention), but to the other pressures the communist regime brought to bear (The Romantics' Promenade, 1958).

In the early 1960s his entire generation turned to Art Informel, with its radical abstraction, anti-aesthetic expressive painting and unconventional materials.

Dlouhý included small objects in his existential Art Informel paintings, which blended irony with black humour (Wall, 1960; Pressure Test, 1962–1963).

Concurrently, Dlouhý developed his version of the “aesthetics of the bizarre”,[10] often with minor wilfulness hidden in details and sarcastic comments of the reality.

Common to all these works was the rejection of art's imitative function and the emphasising of its autonomous existence, using specific objects for their visual, rather than semantic qualities.

[11] Critics in the 1960s saw a connection with Rudolphine Mannerism in the artificial perfection, refinement, hermeticism and bizarreness of Bedřich Dlouhý's paintings, and they compared his art with the Phases movement, contemporary works by the Surrealist Group and the artists featured at the Mythologies quotidiennes exhibition in Paris.

He was part of an exhibition The History and Present of Montage, Objects, Assemblage and Material Art at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague.

[13] The items he incorporated into his objects, originally just simple applied materials, gradually became semantically independent, e.g. as glass reliquaries (Moroa as a Preacher, 1965), and increasingly three-dimensional (Machine for Making Things Worse, 1967).

He elevated everyday items to art objects, combining them in his assemblages with illusionistic oil paintings on canvas that recalled the old masters.