Oil on canvas, 94x69 cm, framed size 107x81 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 an extraordinary distinctiveness and originality, both artistic and human.
The artist's life experiences were always intertwined with his painting. As he himself stated: "I would probably never have been able to create any painting without connecting it to a specific place, a particular memory, or an experience."
Josef Jíra's paintings arise from intensely lived 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 romantic pathos. The expressive foundation of Jíra's work – an energetic, rhythmic style and a restless, subliminal color palette – 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 period 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 prints and canvases are always a place not only of victory and equilibrium of fusion, but also a place of shipwreck. One could say of Josef Jíra's paintings that they are a 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 bristling and constantly on guard; he can only create when his human problems have matured, when conflicting situations have sharpened enough to burst forth in colorful and graphic
flaps."
B.H., Prague 1978
