The online show "Stéphane Belzère - The Wonderful World of Anatomical Jars" echoes "Floating Worlds", the one dedicated to him by Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCS) from December 3, 2021 to August 27, 2023.

In 1995, Stéphane Belzère started to paint in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. There, during almost a decade, he was only focused on the "Soft Pieces", the brains and organs preserved in formalin jars.

This motif soon became obsessional for Stéphane Belzère, a source of attraction and repulsion. Since the Renaissance, painters have been fascinated by anatomy lessons and attentive to the growth of scientific knowledge. Despite his detailed and realistic depictions of organs, Stéphane Belzère doesn’t seek to work as a naturalist; it is this repertoire of forms, exalted by the colors and the transparency of the liquid, that interested him. The anatomical preparation jars open up to a wonderful world, monstrous and magnificent. Besides evoking some organic paintings by Max Ernst or Georgia O’Keeffe, they amaze by their likeness with insects, fruits, minerals and flowers. By choosing to reveal the strange beauty of these scientific objects that are not immediately identifiable, Stéphane Belzère puts painting in the spotlight and offers a dialogue between the form and the formless, the flesh and the material of the paint.

Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCS) is hosting until August 27, 2023 an exhibition of his anatomical jars, including their variations, that are presented side-by-side with the collections of the Strasbourg Natural History Museum. The exhibition title is "Floating Worlds", from Japanese ukiyo-e, literally "images of the floating world", an art characterised by the introduction of everyday subjects into what remains a highly codified painting. These “Floating Worlds” oscillate between different scales and types of presentation making them at times highly realistic, at times indecipherable. In each is affirmed an original reflection on light, colour and transparency. Curated by Estelle Pietrzyk as a dialogue between two different types of collection, the show offers an encounter between a contemporary proposal and a scientific heritage, each complementing and shedding light on the other.