[3] In the concentration camp, he became close to the Polish painter Marian Bogusz, and later, as a scribe in an office, he perfected his German, from which he later translated very difficult philosophical texts.

[4] In 1945, he was accepted to study at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the studio of prof. František Tichý and made friends with his classmates Mikuláš Medek, Stanislav Podhrázský, Josef Lehoučka and Zdeněk Palcr.

He was strongly impressed by the rawness of the installations with reminiscences of war and camps and the primitivizing paintings (in the Foyer de l'Art Brut ) by Jean Dubuffet.

Shortly before his trip to Paris, at the age of 24, he married the painter Ludmila Purkyňová, with whom he had a son, Jan.[6] He continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under prof. František Muzika and in the studio of prof. Emil Filla, but in 1950 he left the school without a diploma to avoid politicized state exams.

In a futile attempt to save his broken marriage, he moved to Bratislava to join his wife, and in the following years until 1958 lived there alone, working as a translator from German and an art editor.

At that time, he was interested in Russian pre-revolutionary thinkers (Berdyaev, Shestov) and especially in existentialism and phenomenology (Nietzsche, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger),[8] Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse and Ludwig Feuerbach.

In the 1950s, under the influence of reading, he felt an "inner emigration", remained a solitaire in his work, and long before the August 1968 occupation, he was already thinking of leaving for Austria.

A classmate of Zdeněk Palcr from prof. Wagner's studio at VŠUP Alina Szapocznikow introduced him to the sculptor Barbara Pniewska,[11] whose material work was the inspiration for the first of his assemblages, which he called Assembled Pictures.

[2] From 1961 he had his own studio on Bělohorská Street in Břevnov and in 1965 he had his first solo exhibitions in Václav Špála Gallery in Prague and House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno.

In Germany, he made friendly contacts that enabled him, after emigrating, to take advantage of a DAAD scholarship offered by the Akademie der Künste and to acquire a small studio in Berlin.

Even when chiselling the stone, he did not abandon the basic principle of connection with memory, and arrived at an organic shape that was reminiscent of the sandstone rocks in the Děčín region that he knew from his childhood.

After his emigration he experienced a creative crisis, he missed his partner, who remained in Czechoslovakia, and the role of teacher was alien to his introvert nature.

[21] Sekal maintained a close friendship with Mikuláš Medek, and in cycles of drawings, often self-portraits questioning his own personality (The Man Who Smokes), he tried different variations from the veristic to the expressive and imaginative.

In the context of Czech sculpture of the 1950s, his Head with Closed Eyes (1955) is exceptional; it is a stylized self-portrait and does not depict sleep but an inward-looking gaze.

The term Dwelling comes from Kafka's short story Der Bau (1923–1924) (The Burrow, 1931) and is related to Sekal's need to find a shelter where he could escape from everyday traffic and work in a focused manner.

In the abstract themes, figuration is suppressed and empty volume plays an important role alongside mass (Signal, 1957, Letter, 1968) or the sculptures approach relief in rendering of surface (Dissection, 1963, Untitled, 1966).

In the composed wire-mesh pieces (assembled pictures), which Sekal has been creating since 1962 in parallel with material collages on paper, and which he considers to be a different means of painting, the primary inspiration of surrealist assemblage is evident, which puts discarded and damaged objects into new contexts.

[31] The surface structuring shared by artists of the Confrontation group, who worked with Informel in the mid-1960s, is gradually replaced by a new quality, consisting in the creation of an apparent or real geometric order (Palindrome I, Royal Walk, 1968) and a more organized form of labyrinth.

Sekal worked with a variety of found metal fragments, and in composing the relief he emphasized the memory of the material and sought a new metaphorical meaning for it (Truce, 1966).

[34] In 1964 Sekal created a plaster statue of the Crucified Christ imitating early medieval works for Vláčil's film Markéta Lazarová.

From the symposium in Sankt Margarethen in 1966, he traveled to the Venice Biennale, which became a strong artistic and spiritual experience and contributed to the purification of the form of his sculptures and composed pictures in the following years.

Shortly before his emigration, Sekal was invited by architect Karel Filsak to design a ceramic tile facade for Prague's Intercontinental Hotel, which became one of the most outstanding brutalist architecture.

Shortly after his departure from Czechoslovakia, he was commissioned by the director of Deutsche Bank to create a monumental wall made of stacked wood in David Hansemann's house in Düsseldorf.

During a painting symposium in Eisenstadt in 1973, he created assembled pictures from pieces of leather (Third Attempt to Simulate a Magical Object, 1973) and continued to collect and preserve material for further works until the 1990s.

As can be seen from the artist's diaries, the idea of building the sculpture from the inside, from its core towards the space, had been on his mind since 1966 and then again when he created the tabernacle for the church in Lustenau in 1979.