Drypoint, print area 39x32 cm, framed size 62x52 cm
Download catalogue of Josef Jíra's works
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, also known as the "Chagall of Malá Skála", is associated with the landscape of the Podkrkonoší region, and with his extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences were always intertwined with his painting. As he himself declared: "I would never have been able to create a painting in my life without being tied to a particular place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced inner conflicts and personal clashes, which in his work are transformed into a strongly 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 a restless, subliminal colour scheme – 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, and by 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 commented on 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 of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristling and constantly on guard, able to create only when his human problems have matured, when conflict situations have sharpened enough to burst forth in colourful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
