Oil on canvas, 80x90 cm, framed 94x84 cm
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About the author:
The name of Josef Jíra, the so-called "Chagall of Malá Skála," is associated with the landscape of the Podkrkonoší region, and with an extraordinary originality and distinctiveness, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would never have been able to create a painting without being tied to a particular place, a specific memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings emerge from intensely experienced internal conflicts and personal struggles, which transform in his work into a strongly emotional statement. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic sentiment. 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 Turnov in 1929, 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 there that he encountered 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 remarked about the artist's work: "His graphic prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and equilibrium of fusion, but also of shipwreck. One could say about Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a series of a single Stations of the Cross, that they are dramas that push banal reality beyond the frame. That is why Josef Jíra is always bristly and constantly on guard; he can create only when his human problems have matured, when conflict situations have sharpened enough to burst with colorful and graphic
valves."
B.H., Prague 1978
