Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, framed size 63x54 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 extraordinary distinctiveness and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences have always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create a painting in my life without being tied to a place, a particular memory or experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings grow out of intensely experienced internal contradictions and personal conflicts, which transform into a strongly emotional statement in his work. His painting is charged with tension, emotional excitement, and dramatic pathos with a touch of romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work—an energetic, rhythmic handwriting and a color scheme that feels 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 here that he encountered the archaic rituals of the Easter season 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 victory and balanced fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say about 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 alert; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened so much that they burst into colored and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
