The untimely death of Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22, has tended to overshadow the remarkable body of work she left behind. Because she so often featured in her own photographs: sometimes naked, sometimes as a bodily fragment – a limb, a torso, a face, a blurred convulsive presence – and in such a multitude of carefully composed surreal scenarios, her enigmatic images have tended to be viewed in oversimplified psychological terms or corralled into gender politics as a feminist response to the male gaze.

Certainly Woodman was interested in personal exploration, just as she was highly educated and well acquainted with art history (both her parents were artists), and there is undoubtedly a sense of personal intimacy and physical vulnerability in many of her tiny, exquisite prints. But her images were also full of wit, humour and inventive playfulness, as well as demonstrating an acute compositional sense. All of the above is in abundant evidence in Zigzag, a new exhibition atVictoria Miro Gallery which includes 10 works newly released from the artist’s estate. The exhibition provides a fresh and arguably more accurate “way in” to Woodman by addressing the work with regard to its form as well as its emotional content.

As its title suggests, the show takes as its starting point Woodmans’s enduring preoccupation with the zigzag which – whether in the crook of an elbow, a bent knee, the corner of a room, a rectangular patch of sunlight or a series of fabric pleats – underpins even her most physically and psychologically charged images. In a statement published to accompany the show, Francesca Woodman’s father George Woodman touchingly recalls that “Francesca made studies of zigzags from representations of houses, noses, hands and baby’s legs… she not only liked its look, she also liked the word… ‘zig-zag’ came easily to her lips.”

Woodman also offers the view that his daughter’s idiosyncratic love of angled abstract forms was a form of rebellion against what he describes as “The Grid”, the rigid horizontal and vertical right angles prevalent in classic modernist works – from Mondrian’s grids to Carl Andre’s bricks – and which dominated the artistic milieu in which Francesca grew up.

As well as in her small gelatin silver prints Woodman also explored her love of zigzags in a series of lesser-known large scale diazotype prints which unfold into a horizontal sequence of images, one of which is in the Miro show. She described these prints in a letter to a friend as “a long string of images held together by a long compositional zigzag, thus the corner of a building in one frame fits into the elbow of a girl in the next frame into a book in the third frame, the images are both very personal mysterious ones and harsh images of outdoor city life”.

This statement, made the year before her death, finds Woodman enthused by experimental ideas and combining preoccupations both personal and aesthetic in her work. An irreverent love of visual mirroring and puns was a constant theme – in one work made while on a fellowship in New Hampshire in 1980, she becomes a contemporary Daphne (the nymph Apollo turned into a tree) encasing her uplifted arms in silver birch bark so they merge with the trees behind.

The show also gives a rare airing to her “Small Sketch for a Piece About Bridges and Tiaras”, a wonderful and hilarious riff on the similarity between these two structures, in which soaring examples of heavy metal civil engineering are niftily collaged into a looping sequence with jewelled accoutrements for the female brow. This sketch sums up Francesca’s fresh and funny perspective, a woman constantly on the lookout for unexpected correspondences between different and seemingly incompatible realities.

Francesca Woodman: Zigzag is at Victoria Miro Mayfair until 4 October