Our guide mentioned to us that we should visit City Hall and we did just that, and we were really rewarded for getting to see it. City Hall is famous for its history, architecture and art collection. It has wall paintings, murals, sculptures, and beautiful rooms. City Hall hosts over 300 events a year and has over 300,000 visitors a year. We also saw multiple couples getting married in city hall. Visiting city hall is free.

The art started before we ever got inside city hall. There are sculptures and water features and gardens outside the building. Walking down the covered walkways towards the entrance doors, on either side of the building, are sixteen wooden carvings. You can see one in the first photo. The carvings are large and elaborate and made by Dagfin Werenskiold, a painter and sculptor. They show motifs from Norse mythology: the life of gods and stories of wisdom and love, war and hate, and magnificent visions of the future. The creature in this photo is Nidhogg, a dragon-like serpent beast.

Central Hall is the second photo. The Nobel Peace Prize Award presentation is done in Central Hall which is decorated with murals by artist Henrik Sorensens. It’s quite an impressive hall, especially for a city hall building. The other four Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden but the peace prize is presented here in Oslo City Hall.

If you go up the marble stairs on the right side of the Central Hall, you get to the Banquet Hall which you can see in the third photo. It’s a great banquet room with fine art and great views of the Oslo Harbor and central Oslo.

We visited the Long Gallery, the Festival Gallery, the City Council chamber and many other rooms. I’m not sure which room is pictured in the fourth photo but you can see that the art is from floor to ceiling. These rooms must be nice places to have a government meeting, at the tables in the room.

The last photo is one of the murals in this same second floor hall or gallery. The artist is Per Krohg, a Norwegian. I’m not sure about the overall significance of the mural but I loved the guy water-witching on the lower left of the mural.