When a hyperlink is clicked, it triggers an on-screen redirection toward a stated Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. This action, though minuscule and often disregarded, is significant in its symbolism of virtuality, and of what virtual curating can offer us. These worlds do not exist in the present, and they are not physically reachable spaces. Instead, they can be found in a life-world that is dissimilar to our own, by switching on an electronic device, connecting to the internet, and allowing a coded set of events to take us on a journey through an art space.

Few artists mix the style and imagery of high fashion with the high concepts and social commentary of fine art as effectively as the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, whose work plays on the tropes of magazine photography in order to disrupt the status quo. Witness the torn-out Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar pages he paints on in his 2011 volume, Wear Me Out: he makes chaos out of art-directed beauty, and in doing so makes beauty out of chaos. Here, Wurm has created an extensive series of exclusive artworks for Modern Matter in collaboration with Olu Odukoya, using special-edition archive issues of the magazine as raw material, as part of our ongoing Overprints project. From this particular Overprint portfolio’s first conception — inspired by the sight of those fashionable painting-collages in Wear Me Out —  to its eventual execution, more than a year of work has gone into the pages reproduced here. Proof, if proof were needed, that good things come to those who wait, and to those driven to create.