Oil on canvas, 42x54 cm, framed size 57x46 cm
Download Catalog of Josef Jíra's works
About the Author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Malá Skála Chagall", is associated with the landscape of Podkrkonoší, and with his extraordinary eccentricity and originality, 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 connecting it to a specific place, a particular memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings stem from intensely experienced internal conflicts and personal struggles, 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 romantic pathos. 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 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 a Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting impression on him.
As Hrabal remarked 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. 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 perimeter of 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 forth in colorful and graphic flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
