The body as a recurring subject

Her early paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s treated figures with a tension that feels closer to the Parisian scene around her than to the later public work. Women appear in rooms, at windows, in states of waiting or confrontation. The subject is not the body as ideal form but the body as a site of pressure. That pressure comes from psychology, from marriage, from the expectations placed on women in the period she was working through. The figures are often cropped or compressed, which keeps the eye close to the surface of the painting rather than letting it settle into a narrative. This is the period that most directly informs the question of what she painted most often, because the figure recurs in nearly every early canvas. The later work does not abandon the figure so much as enlarge it into something public and architectural. Readers who want the recognizable motifs behind those figures can look at the related guide on recognizable motifs in her work.

Childhood, memory, and the act of making

A second subject runs through her career with less visibility than the female body but with comparable persistence. Childhood memory appears in the early shooting paintings, where paint was applied by rifle fire and the resulting surfaces carried the residue of an action rather than a hand. The subject there is partly the act of making itself, and partly the emotional material that action released. She has spoken openly about a difficult childhood, and that biographical fact helps explain why so much of the work turns toward release, color, and the recovery of energy through making. The subject is not childhood as nostalgia. It is childhood as pressure and the attempt to work through it. That thread connects the early performance-based work to the later gardens, where the act of building a space became its own subject. The common themes in Niki de Sainte Phalle's paintings are not limited to figure and color. They include the question of how a painting can carry the record of an action. A reader interested in how color choices shift across that range can consult the guide on prints with a specific color scheme.

Public sculpture and the later turn outward

The Nanas are the most visible answer to what she painted most often, and they are also the point where the subject shifts from private to public. These figures are large, polychrome, and unapologetically present. They take the female body and put it into streets, squares, and parks, where the subject is no longer only psychological but civic. That shift matters for anyone trying to understand her career as a whole, because it shows that the recurring subject was not a single motif but a concern that could be scaled up. The later work also includes architectural projects and garden installations, where the subject becomes the space around the figure as much as the figure itself. The body remains, but it shares the field with architecture, color, and public encounter. A reader weighing whether that public, exuberant register suits a domestic setting can review the related note on work suitable for a child's bedroom. The question of what she explored most frequently is best answered as a movement from interior pressure to public presence, with the body carrying both.