Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) is most widely known for her Nanas. Those large, boisterously bright sculptures of voluptuous women, a colourful feminist manifesto, can be found all around the world. However, it was the Shooting Paintings that paved her way to fame in the early 1960s. And they continue to have an effect on contemporary art. You want an example? Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is one. Niki de Saint Phalle’s father raped her when she was eleven. At the age of twenty-three, she had a nervous breakdown. She had been painting before, but it was only now that art revealed itself, as for so many others, to be an…