Oil on canvas, 35x45 cm, framed 60x50 cm
About the artist:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Malá Skála Chagall", is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape, exceptional eccentricity, and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself declared: "I would never have been able to create a painting in my life without being tied to a specific place, a certain memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings emerge from intensely experienced internal conflicts and personal clashes, which are transformed into a strongly 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 – 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 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 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 commented on the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and the balance of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of one 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 enough to burst forth in colorful and graphic flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
