Oil on canvas, 78x58 cm, framed 86x67 cm
Catalogue of Josef Jíra's works for download
About the artist:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála", is associated with the landscape of the Krkonoše foothills, and with extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intermingled with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting without connecting it to a specific place, a particular memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal 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 touch of romanticism. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – energetic, rhythmic brushwork and restless, subliminal colours – 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 there that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter period and the traditional way of life in a Krkonoše foothills 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 equilibrium 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 bristling and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflict situations have sharpened enough to burst with colourful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
