Brand New Paint Job (Richter Waiting Room)

Jon Rafman’s Brand New Paint Job (Richter Waiting Room) combines the image of Gerhard Richter’s Helga Matura, 1966, with a three-dimensional rendering of a waiting room. Waiting rooms are transitional spaces, positions between points A and B, where one waits in limbo en-route to a destination. Rafman situates the viewer in the position of a person occupying one of the waiting room chairs. The sterile room is devoid of human presence, except for the face of Helga Matura, whose sensuous gaze is disrupted by the seam of the closet doors she adorns. Rafman produces something eerily familiar, a brand new artwork distinct from what it imitates.