Oil on canvas, 62x54 cm, with frame 72x64 cm
Download catalogue 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, and with an extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences were always intertwined with his painting. As he himself declared: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a specific place, a certain memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of 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 a restless, subliminal use of color – 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 area around Horky, where his paternal grandparents lived. It was there that he encountered archaic Easter rituals 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 balance of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of a single Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame's edge. 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 forth in colorful and graphic folds."
B.H., Prague 1978
