JOSEF JÍRA

The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape, exceptional peculiarity, and artistic and human originality.

The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting in my life without being tied to a place, a certain memory, or an experience."

Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which transform into a strongly emotional statement in his work. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic sentimentality. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work - an energetic, rhythmic handwriting and color scheme that appears restless and subliminal - has its roots in the visionary currents of expressionism.
Josef Jíra was born in 1929 in Turnov, but spent his childhood with his parents in Malá Skála. His sensitivity to imagery was shaped by the rural environment and family background, as well as the landscape around Horky, where his paternal grandparents lived. It was here that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter period and the traditional way of life in the Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.

As Hrabal remarked about the artist's work: "His graphic sheets and canvases are always a place not only of victory and balanced fusion but also a place of shipwreck. One could say about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, conflicting situations have sharpened so much that they burst with colorful and graphic
valves."

B.H., Prague 1978