Piccolo Museion – CUBO GARUTTI presents Berty Skuber

Berty Skuber, from the series “UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”, 1995-2002

Exhibition duration 06/08-14/10/2019

Berty Skuber’s artworks are made from clothes labels taken from t-shirts, jackets and other garments and then sewn together on cotton in lively patchwork designs. The South Tyrolean artist has been collecting labels since 1995. She specifically asks friends and acquaintances for them or cuts them out of old clothes herself. Skuber sees labels as a kind of miniature artwork, hidden inside something that is clearly visible, the garment.

Collected together, sorted into different colours or graphic styles and then sewn together by hand, the various patchworks of labels exhibited at the Garutti Cube tell the story of how they came into the artist’s hands. At the same time, these small fragments of coloured fabric also reveal the aesthetics of fashion, graphics and references to the world of art and sales dynamics, as the works include labels from counterfeit garments too.

Skuber therefore focuses the viewer’s attention on hidden objects whose only value is to certify and inform in the same way that garment labels do. The artist collects, classifies and builds a sort of fantastic archive in which found objects, drawings, written words and moving video images are assembled to create another world or possible combinations of an intimate universe. In the artist’s work, freedom, which is seen as the maximum expression of creativity, is the leitmotif that defines the associations, constructions and deconstructions in her works. In this sense, Skuber’s art defies any rigid definition of genre or category.

curated by Frida Carazzato

The presentation of Berty Skuber’s (b. Fié allo Sciliar, 1941) art is part of a series of exhibitions staged at Cubo Garutti with works from the Museion collection dedicated to text and words.
The artist Berty Skuber will also take part in a cycle of conferences at Museion entitled artiparlando (17/10/2019, 8pm). Her work “10 Kalender” (1973 – 1981) is exhibited in the Doing deculturalization exhibition organised by the guest curator Ilse Lafer (until 3 November 2019).

Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti
Via Sassari 17/b, Bolzano

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Berty Skuber from the series “UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”, 1995-2002 (detail). Collection Museion. Foto Augustin Ochsenreiter