Oil on canvas, 45x50 cm, dimensions with frame 52x47 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 Podkrkonoší landscape, extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistically and personally.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create any painting without connecting it to a place, a particular memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings arise from intensely lived internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which are transformed in his work into a deeply emotional statement. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a hint of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic style 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 by both the rural environment and family background, as well as the area around Horky, where his paternal grandparents lived. It was here that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter season and the traditional way of life in the Podkrkonoší village, 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 triumph and balance of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of a single 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; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflict situations have sharpened so much that they burst forth in colored and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
