Martyr with Lemon is a work by Belgian artist Julien Delagrange from a series inspired by the work of Pina Bausch.

Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009) was a German dancer and choreographer, considered one of the leading figures in contemporary dance. In 1975, she choreographed The Rite of Spring, a ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky featuring a pagan rite in which a young virgin dances to her death, sacrificed to the god of Spring. The artist was deeply moved by this choreography, defining the experience as sublime, overwhelming and not fully comprehensible: "I felt connected to their primitive movements, intrigued by the underlying meaning and possible analogies for interpretation, humbled by the power and sheer force." He then decided to pay tribute to this performance with a series of artworks. He collects all the images he finds related to the performance to build a visual archive of poses and figures, which he then uses to construct his compositions.

The composition of the artwork crops and cuts a figure of The Rite of Spring choreography by Pina Bausch. The pose and lighting refer to the depiction of Eve in art history. A surreal intervention is the lemon below the gaze of the figure. It is both a humoristic reference to The Fall of Men with the forbidden fruit – which has often been depicted wrongly due to false translation from Latin to the common tongue – and the iconography of fruit in art history as a symbol of wealth and abundance, but also of sin and decay.

Belgian artist Julien Delagrange's oil paintings and charcoal drawings explore the human condition and experience from a universal, contemporary and anthropological perspective. His purely figurative language adapts to the concepts he wishes to examine in his works: metaphysics, existentialism, (post)modernism, spirituality, and syncretism. His intellectual work as an art critic and his artistic practice as a painter are intertwined, each influencing and feeding the other.