Oil on canvas, 70x60 cm, framed size 71x89 cm
Catalogue of Josef Jíra's works for download
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 originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I don't think I would ever be able to create a painting without being tied to a place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings arise from intensely experienced internal conflicts and personal clashes, which are transformed into a deeply emotional statement in his work. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic sentiment. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic style and a restless, subliminal color palette – 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 village in the Krkonoše foothills, 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 equilibrium of fusion, but also a place 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 alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, and conflicting situations have sharpened to the point of bursting with colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
