“When life gives you lemons …” – in the face of difficult situations, this common proverb calls on us to find creative solutions that might even earn a penny (as Nicole Eisenman illustrated in “Lemonade Stand,” 1994). It reminds us that material realities can change and there’s no need to turn sour. In her first artist’s edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Sarah Lucas destabilizes normative representations of the female breast. By casting her lemons in concrete, she both fossilizes and defamiliarizes them – hardening what is usually soft. Both the motif and the process of illustrating formal and cultural connotations through material transformations are characteristic of Lucas’s work. Oranges, melons, and lemons serve as stand-ins for women’s body parts. For example, “Sex Baby Bed Base” (2000) is an assemblage of mundane objects: a plucked chicken on a hanger wearing a wife-beater shirt with two lemons sticking out of holes in the fabric, set against the backdrop of a spring wire mattress and a battered wardrobe. On first impression, it appears to be an easily decipherable visual pun, yet the piece reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as a complex meditation on gender, sexuality, and objectification. This ­tension – between slapstick and critique – is central to the artist’s practice. Lucas’s use of banal, even crude materials functions not just to repel but also to conciliate the realism of the matter with its imaginative capacities to represent something other than itself. As such, “LEMONS” (2025) is more than a playful nod to a ­proverb; it’s a continuation of Lucas’s strategy to reclaim bodily metaphors challenging ­viewers to reconsider what is natural, what is constructed, and who is looking.