Tempera, assemblage, pastel, paper, 38x50 cm, framed size 61x71 cm
Download Josef Jíra's catalogue of works
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 an extraordinary peculiarity and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences were always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow from intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which in his work transform into a highly emotional testimony. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic handwriting and color scheme 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, as well as by the landscape around Horky, where his paternal grandparents lived. It was here that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter period and the traditional way of life in a Krkonoše foothill village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal noted about the artist's work: "His graphic sheets and canvases are always a place not only of victory and balance of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. It could be said about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That's 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 with colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
