<div><p>If Chris Ofili hadn't worked so hard this year, the gates of paradise would have closed, leaving him outside. </p><p>Instead his Adam and Eve, blazing with sequins under a radiant elephant dung sun, were admitted to the irresistible exhibition which opens today at the National Gallery. </p><p>They hang beside a 1934 Stanley Spencer, showing a dustman risen from the dead in his native Berkshire village, Cookham, reunited with his ecstatic wife, and surrounded by unemptied dustbins and adoring villagers. Although the exhibition has been seen by record crowds in Bristol and Newcastle, this is the first time the two pictures have been hung together. </p><p>Curator Alexander Sturgis, who united them, looked from one to the other, grinning: "The more you look at them, the more you see they have in common. They're both quite nostalgic paintings, and they share an extremely personal, joyful, slightly eccentric visionary quality." </p><p>Paradise is the second of four touring exhibitions being created jointly by the National Gallery, Bristol City Museum and the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. It includes masterpieces from all three galleries, with works by Claud Lorrain, Poussin, Gauguin, Constable and Monet, as well as loans from the Tate, including a blazing 1950 abstract by Mark Rothko. </p><p>The show attracted 80,000 visitors in two months in Bristol - where the entire museum normally gets 400,000 visitors in a year - and 97,000 at Newcastle. </p><p>The National Gallery director, Charles Saumarez Smith, said people in the regions increasingly expected major exhibitions would travel to them. </p><p>Pictures had already been chosen for the show when Mr Sturgis went last year to see Ofili's exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery. </p><p>"As soon as I saw them I knew we simply had to have one in the show," he said. </p><p>Ofili agreed to lend a painting - provided he could work hard enough to complete enough new pictures for his show last month at the Venice Biennale. He did, and the new pictures were among the stars of the festival, while his Adam and Eve stayed home and met the heavenly dustman.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=29684693&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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