German artist Stefan Heyer's exhibition Songs of Earth is the first solo exhibition at the newly opened Grainger Gallery in Fyshwick, Canberra

Stefan Heyer's solo exhibition is the second exhibition for the Grainger Gallery which opened in late November last year. It is an impressive exhibition, handsomely presented in the light-filled spaces. Heyer is a German-based artist and this is the first time he has exhibited in Australia.

While the work could be loosely classified as "landscapes" they are as much landscapes of the artist's imagination as they are landscapes of the natural world. For the artist each is a complex amalgam of personal and universal experience; history and memory; the seen and the unseen; the real and the imagined, all expressed through an idiosyncratic and deeply personal visual language. Stylistically the work is characterised by an unashamed painterliness, with vivid and vigorous compositions overlaid and interwoven with rich textural effects and a particularly effective employment of and engagement with individual brushstrokes and expressive gestures.

While the overall exhibition has a title - "Songs of Earth" - individual works are generally untitled (although accompanied by bracketed subtitles). That said Cat. 1 is given a title (albeit in German) "Die Einzelteile der Welt", ("The individual parts of the world", my translation). This and the otherwise subtitles, indicate the artist's spiritual connection with the natural world.

There is an implied allusion to a world of evanescent myth, a world of immanence which lies embedded in the artist's painterly expressions of his real and remembered life experiences. Heyer's visual language is a highly expressive one.

In "Die Einzelteile der Welt" the composition is enlivened by vivid and energetic application of paint. Rich surface effects are achieved through the juxtaposition and superimposition of bold and dramatic areas of colour, line and gesture with energised spatial configurations.

What Heyer is doing here, and indeed throughout the exhibition, is pictorialising what he views as universal and perhaps unseen connections that run through humanity's responses to the world and beyond.

His language is a highly personal and idiosyncratic construct that enables him to articulate deeply felt, complex and complicated world views that he believes hold relevant synergies with all of us. Heyer's world as presented, speaks simultaneously, and perhaps perversely, of and for us.

It is at once singular and universal, subjective and objective, couched in a joyously sensuous and celebratory personal style.

Heyer's imaginative world happily endorses the actuality of the real world. His use of phototransferred images of Modernist architecture is included in the majority of the works in the exhibition. They act as referents and are also intrinsic to his painterly processes.

They are embedded into the painterly surfaces and thus become intimate ingredients into the artist's creative processes, not merely collaged addenda.

"Untitled. (Reflection on creation and space, Cat. 12)" is a powerful image. It is a summation of what underscores the entirety of the works in the exhibition.

The architectural images anchor us (we are familiar and comfortable with them), while the floral examples and the old playing cards very insistently insert the artist.

The overall surface is lively and activated, exemplified by the artist's characteristic painterliness, land a demonstratively overt infatuation and experimentation with the processes and materials that constitute his art.

Songs of Earth is a joyous celebration of the language of painting and of the complex relationship that exists between artist, object and viewer.