Oil on canvas, 60x80 cm, framed 66x86 cm
Download Josef Jíra's catalogue of works
About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the Podkrkonoší region, extraordinary originality, and individuality, both artistically and personally.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never have been able to create any painting without being connected to a place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings emerge from intensely experienced internal conflicts and personal clashes, which transform into a powerfully 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 – an energetic, rhythmic handwriting and a color palette that appears restless and subconscious – 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 Podkrkonoší village, which left a deep and lasting imprint 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 balance of fusion, but also of shipwreck. It could be said of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are series of one Way 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 guard, able to create only when his human problems have matured, conflicting situations have sharpened so that they burst forth in colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
