Magdalena Abakanowicz exhibition, Tate Modern 2020

A major exhibition of Magdelana Abakanowicz's work is coming to Tate Modern next year. Born in 1930, she had a career spanning six decades, which might have been thwarted several times. The Polish artist came from an aristocratic family, but under communist rule this meant her safety and future prospects were threatened. Not one to be deterred, she changed her name to break her links with the past, but as a female sculptor working at a time when women were largely excluded from artistic circles, she met with resistance. Also, the humble materials she used were looked down upon by the deeply conservative establishment and to add insult to injury, the Soviet authorities did what they could to stifle the avant-garde circles that Abakanowicz mixed in. Still, against all the odds, she became one of the 20th century's most influential artists.

You may not have heard of Abakanowicz, but her public works occupy some significant sites. In Hiroshima, an installation of 40 bronzes of hunched backs without heads form part of a memorial to those who died when American forces dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city in 1945. Her work is well suited to such emotive sites, evoking as it does strength and suffering. According to Antony Gormley, Abakanowicz 'was determined to make work that marks the present and faces the future'. For this reason, her sculptures have a timelesss quality.

The exhibition at Tate Modern, which will occupy the 64-metre-long gallery space of the Blavatnik Building, will bring together a collection of Abakanowicz's woven sculptures, which she called 'Abakans'. The Abakans are huge hanging works made from dyed fabric which possess an uncanny quality. Like much of her work, they are at once alien and familiar, monumental and personal. The Abakans will be displayed alongside other key works, including wooden sculptures and some lesser-known drawings, adding context to these fantastical structures. This show is sure to draw in the crowds and to bolster Abakanowicz's name in the English-speaking world.