Color lithograph, 1980, print area 29x34 cm, graphic sheet 42x42 cm, signed Josef Jíra 80
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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 distinctiveness and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself declared: "I would probably never have been able to create any painting without being tied to a specific place, a certain memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow from intensely experienced inner 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 hint of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work—energetic, rhythmic handwriting and a color scheme that feels restless and subliminal—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 area 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 noted 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 series of a single Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push trivial reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristling and constantly on alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened so much that they burst forth with colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
