Francesca Woodman: Zigzag, Victoria Miro Mayfair - exhibition review

In the eye-catching window of this gallery is a large print of Francesca Woodman lying with a skinned fox covering the length of her naked torso. The confident, sharp black-and-white image stands apart from her small ghostly portraits inside. One of America's most respected young photographers of the late 20th century, she was singularly talented but never reached this exulted status before her suicide in 1981, aged 22. Her work is irresistible, alarming, beautiful and perpetually mysterious.

The works Woodman made in Italy and America resemble empty stage-sets or film stills in which the artist often appears naked, her body in contrast to the water, mud, grass, fabric or marble around her. She seems to be dancing or racing through these scenes and yet the pictures are curiously static. Her unabashed nudity never exudes eroticism but plays with the sculptural shapes emerging from her angular limbs and body.

Among the most striking images here is one of Woodman with her outstretched arms bound with bandages of bark, and another of Woodman sitting, legs apart, presenting her genitals behind a glass pane. The zigzag of the title manifests itself in these images in forms as diverse as light beams on fabric or trenches dug to mirror Woodman’s parted legs. In the closing work, titled Zigzag Study, New York, 1980, a panorama of 13 images is linked by cotton threads suggesting a semaphore message sent out by this enigmatic artist.

Until 4 October (020 3205 8910, victoria-miro.com)