Eyes, sculpture in Tjuvholmen, Oslo, Norway
Eyes is a pair of large dark spheres made of black granite placed on a grassy slope in Tjuvholmen Sculpture Park near the fjord. Each sphere has a short cylindrical protrusion at its center, and the two pieces rest a few steps apart with a view across the water to wooded hills.
The piece was made in 1997 by Louise Bourgeois and later placed in Tjuvholmen Sculpture Park, which opened in 2012. It belongs to a group of works acquired for the new waterfront district built around the Astrup Fearnley Museum.
Visitors often stop to compare the two shapes, which read as eyes from one angle and as breasts from another. This double reading invites people to pause and talk about what they see, making the piece a shared visual joke rather than a silent monument.
The work stands on an open lawn without walls or gates, so you can walk around it and approach it from any direction. The grass can be damp or slippery after rain, and flat shoes help on the sloping ground.
The smooth protrusions act as pupils, but the artist also intended the two forms to suggest breasts with nipples. This ambiguity between watching and being watched is a recurring theme in Bourgeois’ work, and here it appears in a pair of objects that refuse to settle on a single meaning.
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