Vanessa Beecroft (born 1969 in Genoa, Italy, lives and works in New York) does something that nobody else does - she does images live, and that changes everything. Even though most viewers probably only know her work through photographs and videos, it's the staging and theatricality of the live event that make these images of girls, whose vacancy and seductive appeal are equally pronounced, so compelling. In Beecroft's body arrangements, there is a charged and yet restrained atmosphere created by the tension between broken taboos and ancient ideals of beauty, between eroticism and the charm of naked show-window dummies. The artist is making con-temporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards.