Sixty years after his death, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine is being honoured in Antwerp with an exhibition that sets out to recover a chapter of his career that has rarely been told. Ossip Zadkine and Belgium, which opens at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) on 31 October and runs until 18 April 2027, argues that Belgium played a decisive part in launching the Russian-born artist on the international stage. Around 130 sculptures, works on paper and archive documents have been assembled for the show, organised with the Musée Zadkine in Paris.

Born in Vitebsk in 1888, Zadkine settled in Paris and became a leading figure of modern sculpture, working across sculpture, painting and printmaking with an expressive language shaped by Cubism. Yet his earliest champions were Belgian. He put it plainly himself: "The Belgians were my first admirers." His first retrospective took place not in France but in Brussels, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1933. The Antwerp show traces that thread through loans and documents, alongside works by his wife Valentine Prax and by Belgian artists who worked beside him or learned from him.

The Belgian connection deepened after the Second World War. Zadkine, who was Jewish, had spent the war years in the United States; an Antwerp shipowner helped bring his work back to Europe from New York. After taking part in the first Middelheim Biennale, he suggested to Antwerp's mayor that the city create a permanent open-air sculpture display, and he later advised the new Middelheim Museum alongside Henry Moore. KMSKA itself holds nine of his sculptures, among them The Misery of Job, a work the artist donated to the museum.

The exhibition draws on 20 works from KMSKA's own collection, 50 from the Musée Zadkine and a further 60 from museums and private collections in Belgium and abroad. Curated by Véronique Van Passel, it presents an artist whose output ran to more than 600 sculptures and hundreds of drawings, gouaches and prints, and whose expressive forms and emphasis on inner strength secured his place in twentieth-century sculpture.