Oil on canvas, 68x54 cm, framed size 75x63 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 landscape of the Krkonoše foothills, and with 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 in my life without being tied to a particular place, a specific memory, or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which in his work transform into a strongly 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 a color scheme that feels 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 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 archaic rituals of the Easter season and the traditional way of life in a Krkonoše foothill 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 balanced fusion, but also of shipwreck. It could be said of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame's edge. That's why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on guard; 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
