Oil on canvas, 60x80 cm, framed size 72x92 cm
Download catalog 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, extraordinary originality, and individuality, both artistic and human.
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 associating it with a particular place, a specific memory, or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow 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 hint of romanticism. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic handwriting and a color scheme 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 remarked about the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and balanced fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of one Way of the Cross, that they are dramas that push trivial reality beyond the frame's edge. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristling and constantly on alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
