I started the Floating Garden series in the summer of 2019. It all began with a single rose. The rose my daughter received for her 18th birthday. This rose prompted me to think about youth, beauty, transience… I wanted to somehow preserve it from decay, so without much planning and thinking, I put it in the water and iced it. After a while, it came to me how to shoot it in order to emphasize the delicate structure of the petals and maintain its natural color. In addition to rose petals, I began experimenting with other flowers, leaves, twigs, grasses, seeds — everything I would find in my garden. In this natural and delicate world around us I find an endless source of metaphors for life and transience of our human existence.

- Maja Strgar Kurečić

This series won a Portfolio Award in the 2020 San Francisco Bay International Photography Awards.

Maja Strgar Kurečić is a fine art photographer and an Associate Professor of photography at the Faculty of Graphic Arts, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has been involved in photography for over 25 years. At the beginning of her career, Maja engaged mostly in advertising and reportage photography. The last few years she devoted herself to projects that fall within the field of abstract photography. She earned international recognition for her recent projects “Other Worlds”, “Escape Landscapes” and “Floating Garden” that won many international awards. She exhibited photographs on over 50 group and 20 independent exhibitions, held in country and abroad. She is a member of ULUPUH (Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts) and CPPA (Croatian Press Photographers Association).

Visit Maja Strgar Kurečić’s site