The artist and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle has died at the age of 71 in a hospital in San Diego following a long illness.
She was born in 1930 at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France but moved to the US at an early age.
She worked as a fashion model for Vogue and Elle in the late 1940s before moving to Paris in 1952 where she started to develop an interest in painting. Her first solo show was staged in Switzerland in 1956.
During the 1960s she developed her trademark "shooting" paintings or "tirs", in which she shot canvases with paint, often as a kind of performance art.
Her death was announced by the German city of Hanover, which commissioned some of her most famous sculptures.
