Tate Liverpool is presenting a survey of the career of the Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She is famous on the Continent. But here most people have barely heard of her and those who have often tend to dismiss her as a mere footnote to some better-known figures. Does her work deserve the reconsideration that a show of this scale will encourage?

A quick flick through her biography is enough to explain her attraction. Born in 1930, Saint Phalle lived the sort of bohemian life that biopics are made of. Here is the privileged baby of a Parisian banking family wiped out in the Wall Street crash months before her birth. Here is an adolescent rebel, with dark rumours of sexual abuse (by her father) in the background, expelled from school for painting the fig leaves of her convent statues red. Here is the ravishingly beautiful teenager who becomes a fashion model, gracing the front covers of Harpers and Vogue. But here, too, is a feminist heroine: she refuses to remain an obedient muse.

She eloped with her childhood sweetheart, the American writer Harry Matthews, when she was barely 18, and soon found herself a mother, trapped in that prison of social expectations that she had fought to escape. She suffered a nervous breakdown and discovered painting as a form of therapy.

But, as might be expected, Saint Phalle wasn't content to do pretty little watercolours. Instead, she erupted on to the Sixties avant-garde scene with the Nouveaux Realistes: a group, including such figures as Yves Klein (who dragged naked women about in blue paint) and Christo (who wrapped buildings), that was dead-set, like the Dadaists before them, on challenging conventional views.

Eventually, abandoning her husband and two children, she moved in with one of the most celebrated figures of this movement, the satirical sculptor Jean Tinguely. It was as his partner, and eventually wife, that she found fame as the glamorous face of French culture, collaborating with some of the most famous artists of her era (Robert Rauschenburg and John Cage, for example) and putting her name to anything from public art projects through perfumes to Aids-awareness campaigns.

She died five years ago at the premature age of 62, after suffering complications brought about by the plastic polymer materials she had used to make sculptures.

Does the biography matter, when we have the work? As an artist Saint Phalle is most strikingly remembered for shooting her own paintings with .22 rifles. But it was her brightly coloured sculptures of enormous papier-mâché females that would bring her most fame. These Nanas, as she christened them, can hardly be missed. Their vibrant bulges occupy such important public sites as the squares outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the main station in Zurich.

But to put on a survey of the work of this artist is a highly ambitious project. Saint Phalle's oeuvre is immense - not only in quantity but in its rampant diversity and its often enormous size. She has drawn, painted and sculpted, created stage sets and costumes, furniture and films. Her pieces have ranged from a delicate little perfume bottle to a vast reclining figure which visitors can walk into through a hole in the vagina. One breast accommodates a milkbar; the other is a cinema screening Greta Garbo films.

Moreover, an exhibition that sets out to present a comprehensive survey must move at fast-forward speed. It has to. Saint Phalle raced through a succession of movements and fashions and - let's face it - fads. Tate Liverpool has too limited a space properly to put Saint Phalle through her paces. But it gives a good idea of her development. The spectator can watch her race from the decorative patterns of early figurative paintings, past found object collages and shooting-gallery reliefs, towards free-standing sculptures.

There is space for only one or two key pieces - though they are sometimes iconic ones, as with her 1963 King Kong, for instance - to illustrate each stage. But with a row of psychedelic graphics, a room brought alive by a variety of exuberant Nanas, a few photos and bits of film footage and a bizarre bronze relief altarpiece thrown in for good measure, the show manages to condense a sense not just of her career's variety but of her many obsessions.

In fact, if anything the fast pace can make her passions feel even more intense. It helps to give an idea of the almost manic rapacity of this woman's restless imagination. The viscera of a mind tumble out in the process of creation. Saint Phalle's works are fetishistic confections that play with the clutter of Freudian psychology, the symbols of feminist convictions, the paraphernalia of personal beliefs.

The outcome is often almost cartoonishly macabre. Her “brides”, for instance - horrendous Miss Havisham figures in grubby lace, their surfaces seething with appliquéd spiders and dismembered dollies, replica weapons and lurking predators, plastic flowers and fighter planes - are repulsive presences. It may be hard not to respond to the exuberance of the Nanas which, like fat ladies on a lurching bus, are always on the point of completely losing their precarious balance. But you can't help thinking that they look like Happy Eater playground sculptures come to life.

You can't get away from the fact that you are surrounded by garish kitsch. Saint Phalle loved the work of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. She admired his audaciously ugly aesthetic. But, perhaps far more importantly, she shared his untrammelled energy. This vitality shoots like a bolt of electricity through her work. It galvanises heaps of dusty clutter.

Yet so much seems to drain away in the solemn “major survey” context of a gallery show where wall texts push you determinedly towards underlying conceptual nuances and political depths. Take the shooting paintings, for example: reliefs embedded with packets of liquid matter which, when exploded by bullets, sent splatters of coloured paint flying all over the work. These were made for the firing range not the white cube. Exuberant parodies that aggressively ridiculed the sort of macho performance art that was in vogue at the time, they claimed a place for the confused energies of an outraged and ambitious rebel on a male-dominated art scene.

But start to analyse their political and sociological implications and you are dealing with what starts to feel like a raw and slightly embarrassing teenage rant.

Saint Phalle is a sort of French Frida Kahlo. It is not the work that feels important per se. It is the spirit that it captures. It is not the honed political opinions but the raw personal insight. She is an essentially confessional artist. Here in her work is the fearful child, the harassed housewife, the tantric lover, the rebellious creator. They spill out like the stuffing from one of her rag dolls. It all comes back to biography.

So I hope somebody gets a move on and makes that biopic. Uma Thurman would look good in the role.

Niki de Saint Phalle is at Tate Liverpool (0151-702 7400, www.tate.org.uk/liverpool), Feb 1-May 5

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