Unsatisfied with both, he started painting on his own, mostly romantic colorful and “beautiful” landscapes inspired by his native Iceland, a clear break with the current fashions of conceptual and minimal art.

In an effort to support himself he started writing weekly articles for a newspaper back home in Reykjavik, describing life in the Big Apple.

Encouraged by the good reception to the articles, as well as his radio rants, Hallgrímur felt the pressure to take a break from painting and try to write a novel.

Inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary as well as Duchamp's Large Glass, the book tells the story of one summer in the life of a 14-year-old girl who gets her first job at the highway diner and has her first sexual encounter in a tent at the local horse fair.

In New York the subject of his paintings had shifted from landscape to figures: stylized in the manner of Keith Haring and the late eighties, it seemed the artist was trying hard to update the Picasso nude.

In Paris his paintings at first turned more “European”, in the manner of (the American) George Condo, until Hallgrímur found his more personal style, more realistic and cartoonish at the same time, by leaving out the background.

Here he also wrote his second novel, Þetta er allt að koma (Things Are Going Great), which was published in 1994, and became Hallgrímur's breakthrough as a writer.

It was published in 1996 and turned into a successful movie in the year 2000, directed by Baltasar Kormákur and starring Hilmir Snær Guðnason and Victoria Abril.

It is a first person narrative, set in the strange mind of Hlynur Björn, a mid-nineties slacker who never leaves the downtown area, is unemployed and lives with his mother.

The idea for the plot came partly from the French movie, Gazon Maudit, by Josiane Balasko (also starring Victoria Abril), and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The book was originally met with negative reviews and poor sales in Iceland, but later found an international readership, after the movie won prizes at several film festivals.

American novelist Tim Sandlin famously wrote in his review: “Imagine if Henry Miller had written Tropic of Cancer on crack instead of wine.”[2] Since 1996 Hallgrímur has been living in his hometown, Reykjavík.

It was a succès de scandale, since the main character was based on the biggest Icelandic writer, Halldór Laxness (1902–1998), who received the Nobel prize in 1955.

A Tintin-style mélange of Dracula and Pinocchio, the long-nosed and fang-toothed character symbolizes the role of the artist/writer, who sucks blood out of real people's lives and then goes on making up stories about them.

After the big and ambitious Author of Iceland, Hallgrímur published the short and comic sci-fi novel Mr. Universe, written in Italy in the summer of 2002.

Their leader is Napoleon Nixon (a soul that has been both men) who leads the operation against God, a journey that takes him inside Planet Zero, where the Devil reigns.

Set in North Iceland, in the small town of Sauðárkrókur, it tells the story of Böddi, an angry blogger in the countryside, who dreams of a revolution and a complete overhaul of the western capitalist system.

Soaked in German literature, philosophy and romantic idealism à la Nietzsche, after his years of study in Berlin, he finds it hard to fit into his old and very small home town.

Living with his lonely mother, the TV addict, he loses his teaching job on the first page, his love midway and his mind at the end of the book.

Stormland was written at the height of the boom and bubble years in Icelandic history, when the nation had completely lost itself in the materialistic craziness that led up to the big financial Crash in 2008.

A classic tale of mistaken identities, the novel offers an outsider's view of Iceland, that according to the author was “a fun challenge: To write about my home country as if I had never been there before”.

For the occasion he wrote a five-minute-long poem titled Suit & Tie, commemorating the first anniversary of the financial crash that hit Iceland so hard in October 2008.

The result was a show in September 2013 at the Tveir hrafnar listhús, Reykjavík, of black-and-white portraits of famous Icelandic authors from the first half of the twentieth century.

It consisted of nightscapes from the Reykjavík suburbs, cars parked in driveways outside houses, hardly visible in the pitch black dark.

It’s the story of Young Man, a shy 21-year old from a provincial and isolated country, who for the first time in his life is made to live on his own, in a big European city.

Very much an artist’s novel, it describes the soul-searching process of the Young Man, his quest for finding himself, and his wrestling with the giants of the past, like Halldór Laxness, Gustave Flaubert and Edvard Munch, but mostly Marcel Duchamp and The Large Glass.

In Iceland the main discussion around it, though, was about the chapter describing a rape that the Young Man experiences on his Italian trip, at Christmas night in Florence.