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Vigeland’s Monolith in Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway (all photos taken by me)

This morning, I walked through Oslo's Vigeland Park, where snow still blankets the cold ground but slowly retreats under lengthening days. The first tourist bus had just arrived and unloaded visitors from all over the planet. For some visitors, Vigeland's nude sculptures can be startling – a challenging first encounter with Scandinavia's body-positive culture. Yet most will marvel at Vigeland's artistic mastery in expressing universal human experiences.

I walked up to the park's famous monolith, where dozens of human bodies intertwine in an ascending spiral of stone. Under the crisp blue winter sky, these figures – carved from a single block of granite – seem almost to flow into each other, boundaries blurring between individual forms.

Detail of Monolith

These bodies reminded me of Johannes Stötter's work, which I had viewed the night before in my search for beauty to share on Substack to give brief moments of hope while the world turns dark. I admire his remarkable body painting illusions in which human forms merge to create something new. Let’s have a look at some fantastic art: