Born into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, Suzanne Lopata grew up in Paris where her parents ran a millinery workshop until 1942. Further to her father's deportation to Auschwitz, her mother - arrested in the Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup but released due to the exemption for women breastfeeding their baby - took her alongside her brother and sister to hide in a Normandy farm where they lived under false papers until the Liberation.
Back in Paris, Suzanne continued her studies and joined a sewing school in 1948 as part of ORT (Organisation for Rehabilitation through Training), an educational program dedicated to Jewish children who had survived and been dispossessed of their goods; she learned drawing and painting before completing her training with classes at Académie Frochot and then at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After obtaining her professional certificate, she held various jobs while carrying on painting despite the categorical opposition of her mother, frightened by the possibility of an even more miserable life. Determined to win her freedom, she ran away from her family home and rented a dilapidated attic room: there, she painted her basic interior, an account without pathos of her precarious situation.
In 1958, she met Swiss painter Jürg Kreienbühl who was living among the social outcasts in an old bus without wheels in the slum area of Bezons. In 1962, they settled in a small apartment in Argenteuil where they got married in the presence of their gypsy friends, a year before the birth of their son, painter Stéphane Belzère. In her paintings of Argenteuil, she described her home, everyday objects (armchair, bed, window, kitchen sink, etc.) and executed some views of the suburbs.
In 1966, the family moved to Cormeilles-en-Parisis where they bought a house with a very unique atmosphere that became a character in its own right in her work. The rooms with walls covered with floral wallpapers or painted in bright colors are saturated with miscellaneous trinkets: plaster heads of church saints, Art Nouveau vases, Geisha figurines, second-hand objects of all kinds... She sought to transcribe her family and familiar world, by meticulously drawing up an inventory of her house and regularly executing melancholic self-portraits whose modesty contrasted with the exuberance of the bordering on kitsch decor. The recurrence of this home theme reflected her need for a partitioned space as a refuge from the outside world, a consequence of her childhood traumas. From the 1970s, she began to exhibit regularly in Switzerland where her painting was compared to that of Swiss naïve painter Adolf Dietrich.
In the following years, she developed other subjects related to her immediate environment: old Cormeilles, the Daguerre Square near the church, the surrounding countryside, the neighborhood, family vacation spots (Ault-Onival, Hérisson, Vendeuvre, the Alps, etc.). Often associated with that of Jürg Kreienbühl, Suzanne Lopata's work was based on the same meticulous observation of reality but differed by a less documentary approach. Her paintings composed a personal diary limited to the sphere of her daily life, an interiorized reappropriation of cherished people, things and places, sublimated by the simplicity of her gaze. At the same period, she made two sketchbooks, combining texts and watercolor descriptions of familiar places, that constituted a moving poetic object, between anecdotes and personal thoughts.
From the 1980s, alongside her major favourite themes (interiors, still lifes of decorative objects, portraits, monuments of Cormeilles, etc.), she focused on painting some corners of gardens that were little fragments of paradise. Floral patterns were replaced by abundant vegetation and artificial lighting by variations of natural light, like an echo of her teenage fascination with the Impressionists. The freer strokes and the larger skies conveyed a form of serenity, a wonderment without affectation for the cycle of nature.
In 2003, the Centre culturel de l'Arsenal in Maubeuge showed her paintings from the period 1955-2002. In 2022, the Kunsthaus Interlaken held the first exhibition that gathered her work with that of her husband and son; then the city of Cormeilles-en-Parisis paid tribute to her with the exhibition Suzanne Lopata. Painter of Cormeillaise Reality at Château Lamazière. She died a year later, in 2023.