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A Swiss museum will display a bar of soap which an artist claims to have made out of fat belonging to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, foreign media reported.

"The exhibition presents the work 'Clean Hands', a bar of soap which was probably made from the fat of Silvio Berlusconi," Zurich's Migros Museum of Contemporary Art said in a statement.

Berlusconi underwent liposuction at a Swiss clinic in 2004, and a clinic employee gave the discarded fat to Swiss artist Gianni Motti, the statement said.

The off-white soap, which is the size of a conventional bar, will be exhibited until November 28 in its first public display since being purchased by a private collector in 2005.

The clinic has consistently denied the artist's claims about the origin of the fat.

The name of the work is a reference to Italy's "Clean Hands" campaign, a judicial investigation into political corruption in the 1990s.

Motti earned notoriety in 1997 after occupying the seat of an Indonesian delegate during a UN human rights debate and prompting an interruption.