Drypoint, print area 33x35 cm, framed size 64x64 cm
Download catalogue 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 with his extraordinary artistic and human distinctiveness and originality.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a specific place, a particular memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings arise from intensely experienced inner contradictions and personal conflicts, which in his work transform into a strongly emotional statement. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a hint 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 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 a series of a Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame's perimeter. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristling and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened to the point of bursting forth in colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
