Mixed media, colored drypoint, paper, print area 40x34 cm, frame size 55x63 cm
Download Josef Jíra's works catalog
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the landscape of the Krkonoše foothills, and with an extraordinary originality and individuality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never have been able to create a painting without tying it to a place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which transform in his work into a deeply 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 restless, subliminal color palette—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 both by the rural environment and family background, and by 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 foothill 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 the equilibrium of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of one Way of the Cross, that they are dramas that push trivial reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflict situations have sharpened enough to burst into colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
