Alasdair Gray had a long and fruitful relationship with Glasgow Print Studio (GPS) stretching back through the decades to the late 1970s. At the time of his death in late December, the celebrated polymath and Glaswegian lad o' pairts was actively working towards a new exhibition in its gallery space in the city. Today, less than two months after his death at the age of 85, all but one of the works he planned to include in the show – a collaboration with the writer Will Self – are now part of an exhibition at the print studio called Omnium Gatherum.

Several of the works have not been displayed in public before. This includes a suite of seven reworked coloured screen prints relating to his seminal novel, Lanark, and an edition of 60 screen prints featuring his famous Bella Caledonia character from Gray's 1992 novel, Poor Things. The latter has become a taliswoman for the independence movement in Scotland after being adopted by the pro-independence website of the same name. Priced at £1200 apiece, they will doubtless be seized upon by supporters of a cause which was close to Gray's heart.

A couple of the most recent screen prints; Boy With Spoon and Inge with Fox Stoles hark back to versions of paintings he made a lifetime before he died. For many friends and admirers, this exhibition will offer an opportunity to get up close to the multi-layered work of an inimitable Scottish artist and writer. And, in the absence of a funeral or memorial service (Gray donated his body to medical science), it will provide a conduit by which to remember him and reflect on his art.

No-one drew like Alasdair Gray and no-one wrote like Alasdair Gray. His graphic use of colour and line; the marrying up of words and pictures, his self-deprecating humour and innate ability to force the viewer/reader to view the world afresh through his unnervingly steady gaze won him plaudits across the literary world.

Gray, who trained as a painter in the Murals department of the Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s, viewed himself first and foremost as a visual artist. In all the art works he created though, the written word is deeply embedded – and this is write large in this new exhibition.

The show takes its title from a screen print called Omnium Gatherum, which Gray made at the studio in 2017 alongside the studio's resident Master Printer in Digital Imaging, Murray Robertson.

Speaking to The Herald a few days before the opening of the exhibition, GPS director, John MacKechnie, explained that working with Robertson on getting the colour just-so was a major gear shift for Gray. "Alasdair was prone to getting everything to the end stage and then saying he didn't like the colours, but working with Murray on the computer, he was able to get exactly the colours he wanted in the screen print."

Translated into English from Latin, Omnium Gatherum means "a miscellaneous collection of people and things", a phrase which could easily be attributed to the vast body of work left behind by Gray.

The print is redolent of a Soviet-era political poster. Love, politics, religion, sex and death dominate a predominantly monochrome work which is seared by flashes of cadmium blue and scarlet. Two giant figures in the form of a naked man and woman book-end the scene. Inside the woman's body, there is a grown naked man and inside the man's body, an adult female – also naked. Swaddled within a sea of blue, placards spring from mini-cities on either side under the headings "Commonwealth" and "Empire" with opposing mantras such as "co-operate" and "command" unfurling.

In the middle, a scythe-wielding skeleton wearing a crown has the word "LABOUR" furling between its legs. On one side of this bag of bones, a thoughtful man is writing onto a book on which rests a decapitated head. On its other side, a woman has given birth. Underneath her legs is a newborn with umbilical cord still attached. Below the baby in blood-red letters is the text: "What am I? How did I get here, Where am I going? What should I do?"

Gray lived by this these four questions; constantly questioning and scratching away at scabs of society, trying to make sense of an overwhelmingly complicated world.

Gray's first ever book, The Comedy Of The White Dog, was published by Glasgow Print Studio Press in 1979 when he was 44. This story in which a white dog deflowers young maidens on the eve of their wedding, later popped up in Gray's 1983 collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Some 600 copies of the book were printed but today, they are as scarce as hen's teeth as Gray reportedly destroyed many of them himself.

Gray's relationship with the print studio, says MacKechnie, continued with the publication of six black and white lithographs for his novel, Lanark in 1981 under its first director, Calum Mackenzie. "In 1990, we were working with a Berlin print studio as part of Glasgow's City of Culture celebrations and we sent Alasdair and Liz Lochhead to Berlin. More recently, GPS published 30 screenprints going back to 2007 with the series, The Scots Hippo, a reimagining of the T S Elliot poem, The Hippopotamus, in Lowland Scots. Since then we worked with Alasdair on more than 30 prints, including the four or five he did last year."

Gray always meant to colour the Lanark prints and the screenprints he made in 2014 completes this circle. Generous to the end, the dedication on the book jacket namechecks all the staff who helped in the process at the print studio, including MacKechnie, his assistant Claire Forsyth, studio staff; Murray Robertson, Jess Copsey, Scott Campbell and Rosalind Lawless. The final flourish is the dedication to the memory of his wife "Morag McAlpine of Dumbarton and Glasgow 1949 – 2014."

Alasdair Gray: Omnium Gatherum, Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, Glasgow G1 5HD, 0141 552 0704, https://www.gpsart.co.uk/, until April 12, Tue to Sat, 10am–5.30pm, Sunday 12pm– 5pm. Free

Critic's Choice

Until the seventeenth century, landscapes only ever appeared in art as a backdrop in a painting, but gradually the genre made its way into art history in its own right. Today, in our multi-media society there are endless ways to capture landscape; be it in painting, photography, 3D imaging, film or installation.

Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation, currently running at The Lighthouse in Glasgow, is a group exercise in interrogating the land from which we all spring by 16 artists who are part of the Glasgow School of Art's Reading Landscape research group.

The show features work in a variety of media; including painting, photography and video. As well as Scottish landscapes including Skye, Moray, the Rosneath Peninsula and Loch Ossian, the artists have also made artwork inspired by Cyprus, India, Norway and Mexico.

Anyone stumbling into The Lighthouse hoping to see a nice wee landscape painting, should walk away. When I was there, an English couple sped round the exhibition and were heard to grumble loudly: "What's it all about?"

There is however much to chew on in this exhibition and it's worth lingering over some of the film works and the panels which document field trips to the likes of the once-bustling Scalan Mills on the northern edge of the Cairngorms, but from a passing punter's point of view, I can see why heather isn't being set alight.

Marianne Greated's vivid paintings revel in her ongoing interest in the imprint humans have left on the landscape. Ross Sinclair's continuing Real Life perambulation has taken him on repeated walks near nuclear submarine bases at Coulport and Faslane and the result is an installation with pulses with a riot of kitsch Caledonian colour and hot anger.

I was drawn to Nicky Bird's Heritage Site, which brings to life the story of the Five Sisters shale bings in West Calder and the story of a buried house. Shauna McMullan's series SITTING, in which she sits in places with a complicated backstory in Europe was particularly apposite on the day I visited. A panel on an old battered stool informed us Shauna would be performing GONE SITTING the following day – Brexit Day – by sitting on the English/Scottish Border at Scots' Dyke.

Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation, Gallery 1, The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, G1 3NU, www.gsa.ac.uk/events,. Until March 22, Mon to Sat, 10.30am– 5pm, Sunday, 12pm–5pm

Don't Miss

A well-known and respected figure in the Scottish contemporary art world, who has held several important positions including President of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, John Inglis has been a regular exhibitor with Glasgow's Compass Gallery since 1974. This is his first major solo show of new collages and paintings in recent years.

In this series of new and richly coloured collages, Inglis recreates remembered fragments of landscape and coast in complex compositions in watercolour and oil, drawing inspiration from the landscape of Cornwall and North Wales and the archaeology of Orkney.

John Inglis, PPRSW RGI HAWI: New Collages 2016 – 2019, Compass Gallery, 178 West Regent Street, Glasgow, G2 4RL, 0141 221 6370, www.compassgallery.co.uk, until February 29. Mon to Fri, 9.30am – 5.30pm, Sat, 10am–5pm