The gilded panels
Strong colour and gold leaf in the open air.
HMsvein — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Sandbox AS — CC BY-SA 4.0 · HMsvein — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Sandbox AS — CC BY-SA 4.0
Germany invaded neutral Norway on 9 April 1940, seeking Atlantic ports and the route for Swedish iron ore. The country resisted for sixty days and then fell; King Haakon VII and the government escaped to London and refused either to surrender or to recognise Quisling's government. The occupation lasted five years, and a wide resistance worked underground through it — its most famous operation the sabotage of the heavy-water plant at Rjukan, which set back the German nuclear programme. Norway was liberated in May 1945, and 9 April is still a date every Norwegian knows.
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The Rose Castle is a large open-air artwork on a slope near Holmenkollen, made over several years by the artist Vebjørn Sand and his brother, and opened in 2020 on the eightieth anniversary of the German invasion of Norway. It is neither a castle nor a museum in the usual sense: it is an outdoor route among more than two hundred paintings, sculptures and timber structures, arranged to tell the five years of occupation — the invasion, the resistance, the arrests, the camps and the liberation. The paintings are large and strongly coloured, and some are gilded. What makes the place work is the combination of a hard subject with its setting: you stand among the works with the whole of Oslo and the fjord laid out below. The stated intention is that the work be about freedom and democracy rather than only about war. The whole route is outdoors — **the weather is part of the visit**, and the season is in practice spring to autumn.
Strong colour and gold leaf in the open air.
The whole of Oslo and the fjord below the site.
Near Holmenkollen, Oslo