Son of painters Jürg Kreienbühl and Suzanne Lopata, he graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris. In his first paintings influenced by the realism of his parents, he documented the collection of antique plasters abandoned in the basements of the art school and, in Berlin where he had a studio, the no-man's land of the capital after the fall of the wall.
Started in 1995, his series of paintings, "The Anatomical Jars", marks an important evolution in his work. In the so-called "Soft Pieces" room of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, near the grand gallery of Evolution where his father had worked a few years earlier, he directly painted the brains and organs of animals preserved in formalin jars. This motif, which has become obsessional, source of attraction and repulsion, offers the possibility of a dialogue between the flesh and the material of the paint, exalted by the colors and the transparency of the liquid. He continued this theme, not without humour, in his "Sausages-paintings" from his own collection of food jars. A detailed observation of the sediments deposited at the bottom of anatomical preparation jars is at the origin of the "Long paintings"; the strata of disintegrated materials, enlarged by the magnifying effect of glasses, evoke indifferently glacial and inner landscapes, real and imaginary worlds, between figuration and abstraction.
Winner in 2003 of the competition for the realization of stained glass windows for the Rodez Cathedral, he designed a figurative and narrative set completed four years later, in collaboration with Ateliers Duchemin. In order to translate the mystery of life and its perpetual renewal, he combined religious iconography with biological images and forms from his anatomical jars. A symbol of divine thought in his stained glass windows, MRI pictures of the brain are taken up and then developed in a series of gouache stencils.
Simultaneously, he has never ceased to deal with human figure. In Berlin, between 1995 and 2013, he executed a series of seven hundred small self-portraits, called "Nocturnal reflections"; like a diary, he often painted himself naked, through the reflection of his kitchen window that superimposed his body and the city. While accompanying the end of life of his father who died in 2007, he made some portraits of his family facing illness, including oval paintings of his father on his deathbed. For a few years, he has started a series of watercolors called "Diaquarelles", based on family and publicity slides collected from relatives, friends or anonymous people: by exploring analog abandoned images transcribed with their plastic frame and their inscriptions, he draws up a subjective panorama of a bygone world, anchored in collective memory.
His work reveals a strangely real world that unites the formless and the form, the organic and the flesh, the interior and the exterior. Each of his series finds its source in a previous work and weaves an invisible thread between his subjects that deepen gradually: the preservation of flesh, the food production, the representation of body, the brain and the memory... From a meticulous description of reality, so accurate that it sometimes becomes abstract, Stéphane Belzère seeks to see through the visible, as if by transparency, the life of forms and the forms of life.
He has benefited from several exhibitions in museums, such as Floating worlds at MAMCS, Le projet des tableaux longs - Prix Fems at Musée de Pully in Lausanne, Peintures etc… at Musée Denys-Puech in Rodez, Peintures en bocal/bocal de peinture at Musée de Zoologie in Lausanne. His work is part of several public and private collections: Kunstmuseum Basel, FRAC Île-de-France, Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation, Edouard and Maurice Sandoz Foundation, Christoph Merian Stiftung…