Walk through the big iron gates, and you're on a broad avenue leading to a bridge on whose parapets over-lifesize and often over-blown bronze figures are mounted. Some are tranquil: an old man leads a child by the hand; a girl spreads out her long hair; a man and woman dance gravely side by side. Some are violent: one man seems to be flinging a woman over his back; another tosses and kicks children in all directions. They're all massive, thick-waisted, nude but emphatically unsexy. Their faces are expressionless or contorted.
The children, here and in the playground below, are more conventional and appealing. They squat, roll on their backs, look up enquiringly. The park's most famous single figure is a little bronze boy on the bridge, stamping his foot in rage. His hand and ... and another portion of his anatomy are shiny from people touching them.
Across the bridge rises a big fountain, in the middle of which a ring of giants supports a huge bronze bowl. At the corners of the fountain pool, 2m-high Trees of Life in bronze hold other figures that posture through the stages of life. So, in one corner, the tree is filled with infants. Then come adolescents, a young man and woman, a remarkable rendering of a couple plummeting head-first through the branches, a furious man apparently hurling children to the ground, and a skeleton.
A frieze below repeats the motif, ending with a scary scene of Death forcing a couple apart, then a heap of mouldering bones out of which spirits of the newborn rise. Finally, you climb processional steps to the Monolith Plateau.
Like everything else in the park, it's heroic in scale - 120mx60m of stone. From its centre soars the monolith, a 14m-high slab of Norwegian granite weighing 180 tonnes. The 121 writhing, creeping, struggling figures on its surface took three carvers 15 years to complete.
The result is repulsive and fascinating. To many visitors, its agonised stack of bodies evokes the horrors of concentration camps.
Around the monolith are more tableaux, with figures unflinching in their ugliness and cruelty.
Paradoxically, some of the park's most attractive works are seen as you leave. They're the tall bronze gates behind the Monolith Plateau, showing harmonious groups of figures from childhood to maturity.
Whether you see Vigeland Park in the long, bright Northern summer light, or when its statues are deep in snow, there's no denying its drama. It may make you shiver with delight or shudder with distaste, but it certainly lingers.
Oslo Checklist
GETTING THERE: Cathay Pacific flies from Auckland to Oslo, via Hong Kong and London or Amsterdam.
DETAILS: Vigeland Park, Frognerparken, is open 24 hours, every day. Entry is free. Vigeland Museum is open on Sundays only, noon-5pm. Admission NZ$8.
