Oil on canvas, 100x73 cm, dimensions with frame 114x86.5 cm
Catalog of works by Josef Jíra available 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, exceptional individuality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "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 emerge from intensely lived internal conflicts and personal confrontations, which transform into a deeply 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 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 not only by the rural environment and family background but also by 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 village in the Krkonoše foothills, 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 of shipwreck. It could be said about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are 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 alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
