Oil on canvas, 58x40 cm, framed size 53x73 cm
Catalogue of Josef Jíra's works for download
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála", is associated with the Podkrkonoší landscape, and an extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences were always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never in my life be able to create a painting without being tied to a specific place, a certain memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings spring from intensely experienced inner conflicts and personal clashes, which in his work transform into a powerfully 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 – energetic, rhythmic brushwork and colors that appear restless and subconscious – has its roots in the visionary currents of expressionism.
Josef Jíra was born in 1929 in Turnov, 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 here that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter period and the traditional way of life in the Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal noted about the artist's work: "His graphic sheets and canvases are always a place not only of triumph and equilibrium of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are 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 conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst forth in colorful and graphic flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
