Preeti Verma Lal
An angry young boy screaming out his nerves. A man lifting a girl with one hand. A couple twined against the sky, their knees and soles touching gently. A ring of humans holding each other in a circle. An old man leaning with this back on a woman’s back. A gigantic fountain surrounded by 20 trees with sculptures that show the four stages of life: childhood, adulthood, parenthood and old people. A woman dancing in gay abandon, her feet arched, her long matted tresses caught between her fingers. A man fighting flying babies. A woman embracing a giant lizard.
In Oslo’s Vigeland Sculpture Park, no one is clothed. None of the 200 sculptures have a thread on the body. They all stand bare. Naked, they convey a gamut of emotions. Anxiety. Pathos. Innocence. Wrath. Regret. Love. Bonding. All chiselled in bronze, granite and wrought iron. All created by Gustav Vigeland, the man who lends his name to the world’s largest sculpture park by one artist.
At the centre of the 80-acre park stands a 18-metre high monolith that took more than 14 years to carve. Vigeland along with three stone carvers started chiselling 121 figures on the obelisk in the 1920s but it was not completed before Vigeland’s death in 1943. The park is a long walk but the narratives of life, spirituality, divinity and death carved in stone and metal are so mesmerising that tired feet and wobbly knees do not complain. The Sculpture Park is Oslo’s biggest attractions but there’s more art in the city that was once called Christiania (later spelt Kristiania). As soon as one hops off the train at the Central Station, a menacing 4.5 metre tiger waits in the cobbled square. Sculpted by Elena Engelsen, the tiger was created in 2000 to mark the 1000-year anniversary of the city. The animal, however, was not a random choice — the tiger was chosen from the city’s nickname Tigerstaden (The Tiger City).
Other arty surprises lurk in corners. James Turell. Auguste Rodin. Damien Hurst. Salvador Dali. They all find a place under the sun in the wooded landscape of Ekebergparken Sculpture Park. There’s a woman squatting with her pants down. A self-portrait of Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Siden. It mocks the ancient aristocratic law by which property could be handed down only to male heirs. A man is barely a moment away from jumping off the diving board. A woman with tight pony tail and mud on her trousers seems to be walking eternally. Paul McCarthy reinterprets the jolly Santa Claus as a naughty man holding what resembles either a tree or a butt plug.
In Oslo, anyone who has read Henrik Ibsen, walks the Ibsen Sitat, a permanent work of art in which famous quotes by the ‘father of realism’ is incorporated into the sidewalks of prominent city streets. Amid all the artistic renderings in stone, there’s one that intrigues many. It is the sculpture of supermodel Kate Moss at the entrance of a hotel. Moss is not in a tulle gown or a sequinned mini. Instead, she sits on a pedestal with her limbs tangled mysteriously into a yoga asana. In the city within which lie 40 islands and 343 lakes, stone-humans tell tales. Each emotion worked in stone with a hammer and a chisel.
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/2Fv4Np1
via Today’s News Headlines
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