Oil on canvas, 35x46 cm, framed size 53x42 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, as well as an extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and personal.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never in my life be able to create a painting without connecting it to a particular place, a specific memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings emerge from intensely experienced internal 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 touch 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 by both 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 a Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal remarked about the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of triumph and equilibrium of merging, but also a place of shipwreck. It could be said of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push mundane reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst forth in colorful and graphic folds."
B.H., Prague 1978
