Oil on canvas, 50x60 cm, framed size 74x64 cm
Download the 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 and with an extraordinary distinctiveness and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never in my life be able to create a painting without being tied to 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 strongly emotional statement in his work. 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 colors that create a restless, subconscious impression—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 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 bristly and constantly on alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst through with colorful and graphic flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
