Oil on canvas, 60x60 cm, dimensions with frame 63x63 cm
Download Catalog of Josef Jíra's Works
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála", is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape, and with an extraordinary, distinctive character, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never have been able to create any painting without being tied to a place, a specific memory or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of 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 hint of romanticism. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – energetic, rhythmic brushwork and colors that appear restless and subconscious – has its roots in the visionary currents of Expressionism.
Josef Jíra was born in Turnov in 1929, 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 there 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 equilibrium of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. It could be said about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push trivial reality beyond the frame's edge. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristling and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
