Out of the blue. (works of photographer Rineke Dijkstra)

Half a millennium after Botticelli painted Venus as the central figure in the mysterious parable of Primavera, Rineke Dijkstra brings the figure back for a solo turn in the form of a Polish adolescent on the beach of Kolobrzeg. Dijkstra's Venus has the look and slouch of a Renaissance beauty, to be sure, but she is also the picture of a wary, awkward, late-twentieth-century teenager - half wet, half exposed, half accessible, half grown. Like Botticelli's other masterwork, Birth of Venus, she rises up from the alabaster zone between ocean and earth, becoming a '90s cipher of individual evolution.

If this Polish Venus seems to have arms and legs that are too long, she is no different from the other puberty-stricken boys and girls whom Dijkstra has photographed on beaches in Europe and …