Oil on canvas, 60x80 cm, framed 90x70 cm
Download the 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 landscape of the Podkrkonoší region, extraordinary originality, and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never in my life be able to create a painting without being bound to a specific place, a certain memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow from intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which transform into a deeply emotional testimony in his work. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – energetic, rhythmic brushstrokes and a color palette that appears 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 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 the Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting imprint 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 one Way of the Cross, that they are dramas that push trivial reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always prickly and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened so much that they burst with colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
