The relief print is one of the most elemental forms of human expression. In its simplest form, as in a fingerprint, it is the fundamental carrier of human identity, in the hands of Albrecht Dürer and Pablo Picasso, the relief print also became one of the most profound and sophisticated forms of artistic expression known to western art.

This exhibition consists of relief prints, both woodcuts and linocuts, by two artists – Michael Bell, printmaker and painter based in Newcastle, Australia, and Menno Fahl, primarily an assemblage sculptor and printmaker based in Berlin. It is quite a large show, about 39 prints, and has been on the road for some time in various configurations and has previously been shown in Berlin, Lubeck, Maitland and Sydney, before finally arriving in Canberra. About half the show is by Michael Bell, while the other half consists of "collaborative woodcuts", where the woodblocks have been worked on by both artists. The artists explain: "Each artist hand carved an image in response to the other. These woodblocks travelled between the two countries many times before a satisfactory result was decided upon. Some woodblocks journeyed over 65,000km before being finally printed!"

This is a dog of a show, in the full meaning of the word, as virtually every print in the exhibition features a dog located within an urban environment. It was in Bulgakov's classic novel Heart of a dog, that the author posed the question of what the world would be like through the eyes of a dog. These artists offer one possible perspective on this idea.

The two artists also share a similar attitude to the relief print and view it as a vehicle for bold and expressive mark making. In the history of the woodcut, a culmination was achieved with Dürer, but following his death in 1528 nothing much happened for the next 350 years until the 1890s when the French artist, Paul Gauguin, and the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, seriously turned to the woodcut. On the heels of that, one could say, that the woodcut took off with a burst of enthusiasm from the German Expressionist artists of Die Brücke, German and other European expressionists of the Der Blaue Reiter, as well as with the French Fauves and artists like Matisse.

In this revival of interest, qualities were found that were deemed to be unique to the woodcut. Unlike any other art form, or other print mediums such as etching, lithography or screenprints, the woodcut had a physicality with lines gouged and the texture and grain of the wood allowed to leave its own impression. Many of these artists argued in favour of a completely "autograph print", where the artist carves into the matrix, inks it up and prints it themselves. As the German expressionists stated "a little ugliness" gives life to these prints. The artists of the Die Brücke (The Bridge) – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl - were conscious that they wished to break with the old ways and engaged with great slabs of ugliness, but they also saw the need to build a bridge into the future and to a new art public.

Both Bell and Fahl are conscious of the German Expressionist heritage of the woodcut, they believe in the autograph print made exclusively by the artist, and exploit the rough constructed forms in their figures that are envisaged somewhere between the directness of street art and the simplified forms of Dubuffet's art brut. In their large collaborative prints, The dog walkers (2012) and Lambton Park (2012) the forms are direct and confronting, the colours bright and unmodulated, while the seams in their work are left exposed and undisguised. The woodblock has been printed in a manner so that the texture and the splintering in the wood have been used as a background pattern against which the emphatic forms are presented. It is an in-your-face, high-impact form of art.

Michael Bell on his own, as we have grown to expect, works in a more demotic manner with a good dose of high-octane humour. His linocut, Anzac Day Fly Past (2010) shows the Australian War Memorial with a flock of screeching cockatoos overhead. It could be thought of as being slightly trite in its one-liner humour, but it also very effective and beautifully accomplished. I am reminded of Eric Thake's wonderful linocuts that have their own sense of perfection.

Krazy Kunst is a bold and memorable exhibition that will make you smile and also it provides you with things to discuss with your favourite canine companion.