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Astrup Fearnley Museum
With its often steamy content, the Astrup Fearnley Museum certainly begs the question, 'what is art?' Don't miss the gilded ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles, by Jeff Koons.
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Children's Art Museum
If you have a particular affinity for your friends' refrigerator art displays, visit the Children's Art Museum near the Frøen T-bane station.
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Emanuel Vigeland Museum
For a freakish sensory overload, enter the Emanuel Vigeland Museum, containing his life's work and mausoleum - a specially designed vaulted chamber where you duck under a low door (and thus pay tribute to his ashes, interned above) to enter an eerie nave with almost zero lighting.
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Frognerparken
Frognerparken, which has as its centrepiece Vigeland Park, is an extraordinary open-air showcase of work by Norway's best-loved sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. Vigeland Park is brimming with nearly 212 granite and bronze Vigeland works. His highly charged work ranges from entwined lovers and tranquil elderly couples to contempt-ridden beggars. His most renowned work, Sinataggen (the 'Little Hot-Head'), portrays a London child in particularly ill humour.
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Geological-Palaeontological Museum
The Geological-Palaeontological Museum adjacent to the Zoological Museum, contains displays on the history of the solar system and Norwegian geology, as well as examples of myriad minerals, meteorites and moon rocks. The palaeontologic section includes a 10m-long iguanodon skeleton and a nest of dinosaur eggs.
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Henie-Onstad Art Centre
In Høvikodden, west of the centre, lies one of Norway's best private art collections, the Henie-Onstad Art Centre, founded in the 1960s by Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie and her husband Niels Onstad. The couple actively sought out collectible works of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, as well as assorted impressionist, abstract, expressionist and modern Norwegian works.
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Historical Museum
The highly recommended Historical Museum is actually three museums under one roof. Most interesting is the ground floor National Antiquities Collection (Oldsaksamlingen), with displays of Viking-era coins, jewellery and ornaments. Look out for the 9th-century Hon treasure, the largest such find in Scandinavia (2.5kg). A section on medieval religious art includes the doors and richly painted ceiling of the Ål stave church (built around 1300).
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Ibsen Museum
Housed in the last residence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, the Ibsen Museum is a must-see for Ibsen fans along with his birthplace of Skien or Grimstad, where the eminent playwright spent his formative years. The study remains exactly as he left it and other rooms have been restored in the style and colours popular in Ibsen's day. Visitors can even glance into the bedroom where he uttered his famously enigmatic last words 'Tvert imot!' ('To the contrary!'), before dying on 23 May 1906.
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Ice Skating Museum
The Ice Skating Museum is dedicated to speed and figure skating in Norway. Featured are historical skating apparatus and information on such Norwegian champions as speed skater Johann Olav Koss - 'Koss the Boss' - and figure skater Sonja Henie. It makes a nice complement to the Olympic sites in Lillehammer and Hamar .
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Kon-Tiki Museum
A favourite among children, the worthwhile Kon-Tiki Museum is dedicated to the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. The museum also displays the totora reed boat Ra II, built by Aymara people on the Bolivian island of Suriqui in Lake Titicaca. Heyerdahl used it to cross the Atlantic in 1970.
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Mini Bottle Gallery
Want to see the ridiculous and enormous collection of a wealthy brewer? Check out the Mini Bottle Gallery. This 'gallery' crosses architectural elegance and haunted-house gadgetry with the crass overtures of a puerile club. As you admire tens of thousands of tiny bottles of booze set in an environment whose expensive design surpasses many museums, you're bound to wonder if the place is a joke. The answer comes readily in the bathroom.
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Munch Museum
Dedicated to the life work of Norway's most renowned artist, the Munchmuseet contains 5000 drawings and paintings that Munch bequeathed to the city of Oslo. Ten years after The Scream was stolen from Nasjonalgalleriet, masked gunmen pulled a similar caper on another version of the famous painting here in 2004. It too was recovered, in 2006.
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National Gallery
One of Oslo's major highlights is the National Gallery. It houses the nation's largest collection of Norwegian art, including works from the Romantic era and more-modern works from 1800 to WWII. Some of Edvard Munch's best-known creations are on display, including his most renowned work, The Scream . There's also an impressive collection of European art with works by Gauguin, Picasso, El Greco and many of the impressionists: Manet, Degas, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne and Monet.
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National Museum of Contemporary Art
Featuring the National Gallery's collections of post-WWII Scandinavian and international art is the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of the 3000-piece collection is definitely an acquired taste, but it does provide a timely reminder that Norwegian art didn't cease with Edvard Munch.
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Nobel Peace Center
Norwegians take pride in their role as international peacemakers, which explains the central location of the new Nobel Peace Center in Aker Brygge. Opened in 2005, the centre is Oslo's most technically advanced museum, with an array of digital displays that are intended to offer as much or as little information as the visitor desires. Don't miss the Nobel Book on the 2nd floor or the movie theatre streaming films on the history of the prize and its winners.
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Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum
The author Roald Dahl once said that in Norway, everyone seems to have a boat, and there is no better place to explore that theory than at the Norske Sjøfartsmuseum. The museum depicts Norway's relationship with the sea, including the fishing and whaling industry, the seismic fleet (which searches for oil and gas), ship building and wreck salvaging.
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Norwegian Film Museum
The Norwegian Film Museum has a colourful and lovingly presented selection of displays on the history of filmmaking, clips of old films (from silent, black-and-white shorts, to WWII documentaries) and pictures of Norwegian stars. Classic movies are screened regularly in the theatre on the 2nd floor.
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Norwegian Folk Museum
Norway's largest open-air museum and one of Oslo's premier attractions is the Norwegian Folk Museum. The museum includes more than 140 buildings, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries, gathered from around the country, rebuilt and organized according to region of origin. Paths wind past old barns, elevated stabbur (raised storehouses) and rough-timbered farmhouses with sod roofs sprouting wildflowers.
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Norwegian Resistance Museum
Within the fortress complex, adjacent to a memorial for resistance fighters executed on the spot during WWII, is the Norwegian Resistance Museum. The small, but worthwhile museum covers the dark years of German occupation, as well as the jubilant day of May 9, 1945 when peace was declared. Artefacts include a set of dentures belonging to a Norwegian Prisoner of War in Poland, which were wired to receive radio broadcasts, underground newspapers, numerous maps and photographs.
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Norwegian Science & Technology Museum
A popular rainy day distraction is the Norwegian Science & Technology Museum near Lake Maridal which has Norway's first car and tram, water wheels, clocks and enough gadgetry to keep the whole family busy for a few hours at least.
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Oslo City Museum
Near the southern entrance to Vigeland Park lies Oslo City Museum housed in the 18th-century Frogner Manor (built on the site of a Viking-era manor); it contains exhibits of minor interest on the city's history.
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Polarship Fram Museum
Nature is often the best architect. Which is why, when the well-known ship builder Colin Archer was asked to design a ship whose hull could withstand the crush of the polar ice, he looked no further than an egg for inspiration. Launched in 1982, the Polarship Fram Museum, captained by both Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, spent much of its life trapped in the polar ice.
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Ski Museum
At the Holmenkollen ski jump, the Ski Museum leads you through the 4000-year history of Nordic and downhill skiing in Norway. There are exhibits featuring the Antarctic expeditions of Amundsen and Scott, as well as Fridtjof Nansen's slog across the Greenland icecap (you'll see the boat he constructed from his sled and canvas tent to row the final 100km to Nuuk). Recently redone exhibits on the second floor cover the more modern aspects of skiing and include a glimpse of the royal family on skis.
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Stenersen Museum
The Stenersen Museum contains three formerly private collections of works by Norwegian artists from 1850 to 1970. The museum and much of the art, which includes works by Munch, were a gift to the city by Rolf E Stenersen.
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Vigeland Museum
For a more in-depth look at the development of Gustav Vigeland's work, visit the Vigeland Museum. The museum was built by the city as a home and workshop for Vigeland in exchange for the bulk of his life's work and contains his early statuary, plaster moulds, woodblock prints and sketches.
