Berty Skuber

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.