Oil on canvas, 85x140 cm, size with frame 94x149 cm
Download Josef Jíra's catalogue of works
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape and an extraordinary distinctiveness and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a particular place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow from intensely experienced inner conflicts and personal confrontations, 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 romanticism. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic style and a color scheme that feels restless and subconscious – 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 both 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 a Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal noted about the artist's work: "His graphic sheets and canvases are always a place not only of victory and the equilibrium of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of a stations of the cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That's why Josef Jíra is always prickly and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst with colorful and graphic flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
