Lorenzo Grifantini - Sea Beasts
To mark the start of the Summer holiday season, we are very pleased to present the series Sea Beasts by Italian photographer Lorenzo Grifantini.
Sea Beasts is a spin-off of Grifantini’s acclaimed project Italian Summer, an ongoing exploration of the visual and cultural idiosyncrasies that define Italy’s seaside life. In this new series, the focus is shifted to one of the most whimsical and eye-catching aspects of the beach: inflatable creatures.
From towering pink flamingos to green turtles, blue dolphins, and white swans, these oversized plastic animals populate the beaches of Salento, Puglia in a surreal, almost carnivalesque display. They form an artificial menagerie that floats between fantasy and memory, transforming the coastline into a vivid, inflatable zoo.
The project taps into a deep well of nostalgia: echoes of childhood summers, the smell of sunscreen, the sound of crashing waves and reinterprets them through a contemporary lens. These inflatables, at once playful and absurd, evoke the glossy, hyperreal aesthetics of pop artists like Jeff Koons. Like his work, Sea Beasts examines the tension between kitsch and beauty, consumerism and desire.
By capturing these ephemeral sculptures in their natural beach habitats, Grifantini aims to reveal the peculiar poetry of the Italian summer – an ever-evolving cultural theatre where tradition meets spectacle, and where memory inflates like a balloon, bright and buoyant under the southern sun.
Lorenzo Grifantini is an architect and photographer. For Grifantini, the two are interlinked, they both are related to the idea of space, tri-dimensionality and people interacting with the environment. A self-taught photographer, his work has been published in magazines such as Vice, Stern, La Repubblica, Lens Culture and Vogue Italia. His work has appeared in advertising campaigns for Vodafone and Stella Artois, and been exhibited in the UK, Germany and Italy.