The Garden of Earthly Delights (1500 to 1510), the masterpiece of the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, is also one of the most memorable and symbolic paintings in history. Housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, it is a triptych oil painting on wood (measuring overall 220 x 389cms) that represents a determined voyage by Bosch into a fantasy world of originality which borders on the hallucinatory and the truly amazing. Over the centuries, and particularly since the invention of the subconscious, every sort of theory has been advanced to explain the stunning and scarcely human imagination shown in this painting but, for a picture that has left such an indelible mark on the Western imagination it is surprising how resistant it is to neat interpretation, and a satisfactory explanation of the picture remains elusive to this day.

As a tribute, Art Space Gallery has ventured to invite five artists to offer their own contemporary take on The Garden of Earthly Delights with a suite of works made specifically for this exhibition to conclude our 2001 programme.

Humour is the important element that Eileen Cooper takes from the painting itself; the dark humour which is not the humour of the casual joke but the humour of survival.

Paul Gopal-Chowdhury's imagery hovers on the cusp between fact and fantasy, where demons, angels and other mythological subjects occupy part dream space and part urban hell. John Kiki, on the other hand gives us pure brilliant colour flung on the canvas with desperate energy, his figures and animals cavorting in an earthly paradise. But the atmosphere is more of comic tragedy than carefree pleasure and beneath the surface of Kiki's paintings lurk more disturbing questions of innocence and guilt.

George Rowlett's, succulent 'plein air' paintings demonstrate that without recourse to mythology, there is heaven to be found on earth. In contrast Andrea McLean builds up her paintings as a balancing act of the monumental and the miniature. Gargantuan paintings and small etchings alike are a myriad of shapes and colours that on closer inspection depict a world of animals, houses, figures. Like Bosch her paintings represent to her, ways of making sense of the world, ideas about the future, something beautiful and something apocalyptic.

The artists chosen for the show are all deeply analytical about their work and care passionately about the importance and continuity of painting. The works in the exhibition will not help in unravelling the mysteries of The Garden of Earthly Delights, but they do reflect a group of artist expressing their own painterly sensitivity and glorying in the enduring spirit and moral relevance of a painting made five hundred years ago. That says a lot about painting.

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