Oil on canvas 45x55 cm, framed 61x50 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 region, exceptional originality, and distinctiveness, both artistically and personally.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself declared: "I would never have been able to create any painting without connecting it to a specific place, a certain memory, or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which are transformed into a strongly emotional statement in his work. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – energetic, rhythmic brushwork 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 both by the rural environment and family background, and by 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 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 victory and the balance of fusion, but also of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of a Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened to the point where they burst forth in colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
