Oil on canvas, 50x60 cm, framed 64x54 cm
Catalogue of Josef Jíra's works for download
About the Author:
The name of Josef Jíra, also known as "the Malá Skála Chagall," is associated with the Podkrkonoší region, and with 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 never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a specific place, a certain memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings stem from intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which transform into a deeply 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 – 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 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 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 victory and the equilibrium 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 colorful and graphic folds."
B.H., Prague 1978
