In some of De Chirico’s paintings too, (I’m thinking of Melancholy and Mystery of a Street - the girl with the hoop) and perhaps Hopper’s, in a different way, one has the feeling it’s more about what isn’t in the picture than what is – there’s an overwhelming feeling of absence and the kind of absence that’s really about presence, that’s really about what either was there and isn’t any longer, the person who has walked out of the frame, the one who is expected at any minute around the corner of a building, or the trace of the trauma that remains in a space, the shock that the place in which things exist registers.

Yet, I find Christine Dixie’s works more ominous than either De Chirico’s or Hopper’s. They provoke disquiet in the viewer I think precisely for this feeling of a space that is not quite empty, that has witnessed some horror, but they also holds our fascination for their fine technical execution. Dixie, who lectures in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, obtained her degree in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand and her Masters degree at Michaelis School of Fine Art. Though her work spans a range of media from installation, digital prints, mixed media and printmaking, her finest accomplishment is in her printmaking.

Lately, the themes of paternity (The Binding) and that of motherhood and the female body (Parturient Prospects and the birthing tray series reminiscent of some Renaissance art) have dominated Dixie’s work. But she continues to look at space, land, history and boundaries, tragedies in works David Bunn has described as the visual equivalent of JM Coetzee.