A successful Czech sculptor, painter and collagist, Věra Janoušková enrolled at the School of Applied Art in Prague in 1942 in the studio of the sculptor Karel Dvořák. After the war she transferred to the studio of Josef Wagner, where her fellow students were Olbram Zoubek, Eva Kmentová, Miloslav Chlupáč, Zdeněk Palcr and her future partner Vladimír Janoušek, who along with herself —— Věra Havlová as she then was —— were the future leading figures of Czech sculpture. At that time Janoušková absorbed all possible influences, from structural abstraction to pop-art. But closest to her own sculptural sentiment was the oeuvre of Otto Gutfreund, Pablo Picasso and Jean Dubuffet. In the first half of the 1960s her sculptural output was synonymous with a search for shape and expression that went hand in hand with experimentation with various materials and their bonding. She adopted the same approach not only with sculptures but also paper collages. In her work she made use of all sorts of techniques, including frottage, scorching, tearing and drawing, when she would create layers of paper scraps or crumple them. In her sculptural activity she abandoned modelling and created her sculptures by assembling individual components. This resulted in a series of coloured figures stitched together with welder’s wire out of bits of used or discarded enamelled objects. An example of this is the Big White Coat which has clearly humorous overtones. But that was only superficial. The artist chose the coat as a subject as a sort of allusion to the constraints and restrictions suffered by her generation in the 1970s, when the regime in power prevented them from exhibiting their works and they lived in permanent artistic and social isolation.