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Hervé Yamguen

Prendre soin, 2023

Courtesy of the artist

Collection

Hervé Yamguen

Prendre soin, 2023

Acrylic on canvas

79 x 100 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Prendre soin (“To Take Care”), Hervé Yamguen offers a tender and multilayered meditation on care as a radical, creative, and deeply embodied act. Created in 2023, the drawing reflects the artist’s ongoing concern with the emotional and spiritual dimensions of daily life—where gestures of protection, attention, and healing hold quiet power.

The composition is rich with symbolic interplay. Human forms merge with plants, musical motifs, and abstract rhythms, suggesting that to care is not only to tend to others but to stay attuned to the invisible threads that connect beings, places, and inner worlds. A central figure—perhaps a guardian, perhaps a self-portrait—radiates a sense of calm vigilance, surrounded by eyes, hands, and celestial bodies. As in much of Yamguen’s work, these motifs invite viewers to consider multiple levels of meaning at once: physical care, emotional presence, ancestral continuity, and cosmic alignment.

The palette—vibrant yet harmonious—evokes both vitality and contemplation. Using ink and colored pencil, Yamguen draws with a tactile sensitivity that mirrors the theme itself: the slow, deliberate act of tending, of staying close, of listening.

Prendre soin is not didactic but intimate. It invites us into a space where care is not heroic, but necessary and sacred—a quiet resistance against fragmentation and forgetting. In this way, Yamguen’s drawing becomes a visual poem, a reminder that care begins with seeing, feeling, and connecting—with others and with oneself.

Related works in the collection

Hervé Yamguen Se Sauver, 2023

Hervé Yamguen L'arrière pays mental, 2023

Hervé Yamguen Histoire de têtes 3, 2018

Hervé Yamguen Prendre soin, 2023

Artists

Hervé Yamguen