Ossip Zadkine and Valentine Prax, 1928

Ossip Zadkine's contribution to the Imagery of Chess show in unknown.

Zadkine was a painter and lithographer, but most of all a sculptor.

He was born in Belarus in 1890 but at 15, he moved England, his mother's homeland. At 19, after attending  the Central School of the Arts in London, he moved to Paris where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but soon quit after finding work freelancing. Zadkine embraced Cubism and quickly built a reputation as a foremost Cubist artist.

In 1942, he emigrated to the United States where he worked in New York, Arizona and North Carolina (where he taught a Summer session at the Black Mountain College in 1945, along with Robert Motherwell). After the war, he returned to Paris to lecture at he Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He won the Grand Prix for sculpture at the 1950 Venice Biennale.

He was married to Valentine Prax, a French-Algerian Expressionist painter. Zadkine died in 1967.