"Artists are doing the impossible all the time, creating things of great value without having any resources. I can say that I have created valuable things, maybe, for no money at all. I think that's the genius of the artist." This comment, from Magnús Pálsson's interview with Catrina Heden in 1994, reflects not only the artists monetary situation, but his determination to find beauty and meaning in simple objects and circumstances, to avoid ostentation and deliver to the viewer the simplest representation of his ideas, often made of almost nothing at all, and to let it evoke meaning and fertilize the viewer's mind rather than be for its own sake. Many of his works have been fragile and temporary and now exist only in photographs, some are lost altogether. Performance has also been a prominent part of his output, sometimes recorded on film or video, sometimes not. Nonetheless, his aesthetic has perhaps been the greatest influence on the development of Icelandic art in the last three or four decades, through his exhibitions and performance works and through his work in teaching and assisting younger artists.

"A good art school can produce any number of good artists. There can be a lot of coincidence in it, but some important situations have been created not necessarily by somebody, but by circumstance, at some point in time. Certain people have perhaps by chance been placed at a certain time in a certain explosive situation that had the potential to create art or artists. A situation that engenders creativeness in people who happened to be there. Of course they have to have some mental facility to be able to benefit from the situation.

"When the feeling of friendship between people disappears from art, something is lost ... All the same, we cannot rule out that there are people who isolate themselves, wh can't or don't want to take part in this kind of collaboration of giving and taking ideas and creative inspiration. The best of them, however, are of course very generous, because if they create their works in isolation, they give them out very generously. But artists are too stingy with comments and praise of each other's work."

Born in East-Iceland in 1929, Magnús Pálsson studied theatre design and art in the early 1950s and became an active participant in Iceland's embryonic avant-garde, collaborating with alternative theatre groups as well as with other artists such as Dieter Roth and later the SUM-group of young artists that formed in 1965. His first private exhibition was in 1967 where he exhibited hollow torsos made of paper, glue and paint, along with plaster. Plaster became his favoured medium for plastic art in the late 1960s and early 1970s as he focused on casting various "impossible" subjects, such as the empty spaces between things. Perhaps his best known piece of this kind is a cast of the space between the three wheels of a helicopter and its landing field, seconds before the it actually touched down. This work, made in 1976, was seen in Venice in 1980 when Magnús represented Iceland at the Biennale.

In discussion with critic Ólafur Gíslason, Magnús explained his approach thus: "The less material there is in art, the more noble it becomes, and once it has long since ceased to be visible except as a memory of art, that's when it is best ... The next step is for art to become mere sound or smell, phonomena which are visible and visual within the mind all the same. In this way, sound has a form and is an image. There is no difference in this sense between different branches of the arts. They are all one. Music and the written text alike have an image, and visual art has sound, and when all is said and done this is the same thing and obeys the same rules.

The Reykjavík Art Museum held a large retrospective exhibition of Magnús' art in 1994 and published a catalogue which remains today the best overveiw of his work.