Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, dimensions with frame 53x43 cm
Download Catalog of Josef Jíra's Works
About the artist:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape, as well as an extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and personal.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I probably would never have been able to create any painting in my life without being tied to a specific place, a particular memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings emerge from intensely experienced inner conflicts and personal clashes, 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 - an energetic, rhythmic style 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 there 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 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 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 conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst forth in colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
