After the discovery of abstraction and collage, Sebidi felt that she could really grow by tearing images apart. She reconstructed and juxtaposed them, filling the painting with marks, shapes and body parts of both humans and animals. Although being distorted, pictorially they are united and confront one another and the viewer.
Every inch of her picture surface is covered with bodies. There is no room to breathe, no time to stop and relax. These are like the squeezed houses in the townships. Often she combines the head profiles and frontal views of her figures. This reminds one of Picasso's use of simultaneity and his disregard for linear and atmospheric perspective.
Sebidi's drawings and paintings have a sense of fierceness like Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This is seen in the way she cuts up the human body. Unlike Picasso, however, she uses simultaneous viewpoints to emphasize three-dimensionality on the picture surface. This shows that she is a potter and sculptor as well. Her way of destroying form and restructuring it with new meaning is quite Cubist in style, but was never intended to match this European movement.
In her expressionistic style Sebidi understands perfectly the possibilities of a space which is as palpable as form itself. Her use of compressed space nearly invades the spectator's own space. The concentration on areas between and around solid form contributes both to the sensation of claustrophobia and to the densely patterned surfaces. Her beautifully textured mark-making is encouraged by the pure and bright colours that she uses.
The rich colours that she works in were chosen when she was doing her earlier works. She has always liked bright oil colour, though her use of colour can be seen to tend towards garish, with all these brightness colours placed alongside one another. They often clash and this is therefore not often a successful creative device, as it tends to cause the focus to spread without control. This is particularly relevant to Sebidi as she often does not make use of a central feature in her work. A central feature is obviously not essential, but when absent can cause works to seem vague.
Her images are accompanied by titles that add meaning to her work. They are usually invented once works are complete, which means that they do not explain images as such. The titles are texts that summarize her philosophic concerns and these are often poetic.
Seen in the context of her background, Sebidi's work is highly impressive. Other black artists have either wrestled with or embraced European styles and methods, but few have taken out and evolved something entirely their own, as she has done. It is interesting to remember that Picasso was a great admirer of African art and he borrowed just what he wished from the foreign styles. This is the borrowing process in reverse, being done by a very determined artist.