Oil on canvas 40x30.5 cm, dimensions including frame 41.5x32.5 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, extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never in my life be able to create any painting without being connected to a place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced inner contradictions and personal conflicts, which in his work transform into a powerfully emotional statement. 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 both by 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 Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal noted about the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and balanced fusion, but also of shipwreck. One could say about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of one Way 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, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
