Oil on canvas, 80x60 cm, framed size 93x75 cm
Catalogue of Josef Jíra's works for download
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the landscape of the Krkonoše foothills, and with extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never in my life be able to create a painting without being tied to a particular place, a certain memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow from intensely experienced inner contradictions and personal conflicts, which in his work transform into a strongly emotional statement. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic sentiment. 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 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 there that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter period and the traditional way of life in the Krkonoše foothill village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal remarked about the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and the balance of fusion but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push mundane reality beyond the frame's edge. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
valves."
B.H., Prague 1978
