We preview the first UK exhibition of the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, which opens this month at Tate Liverpool. Beautiful, flamboyant, daring, provocative and fiercely independent, she emerged in the 1960s as a powerful and original figure in the highly masculine international arts world. The exhibition includes her acclaimed Shooting Pictures, made by firing a .22 rifle into bags of paint strapped to a canvas, as well as her brightly coloured, exuberant sculptures of enormous women, which she christened the ‘Nanas’.