The new exhibition of painter L.S. Lowry's landscapes and industrial scenes painted from the 1900s to the 1960s confirms his status as the pre-eminent painter of British working class life with a relevance that reaches across the world to countries that are industrializing, according to the exhibition curator.

Lowry, who died aged 89 in 1976, lived all his life in and around the industrial city of Manchester in the north of England and chose as his subject for a lifetime of painting the scenes of everyday life he saw around him.

He painted factories, industrial landscapes, football matches, fairs, funerals, fights in the street, and all the events that would take place in any urban setting.

Helen Little, exhibition curator, told Xinhua, "Lowry is remarkable; he is incredibly rare and he was ambitious. He realized that nobody else had made this subject a serious subject for art and he set out to do it.

"As a result of that, without Lowry, Britain would have lacked an account in paint of the British working class."

Little said that Lowry was perhaps more relevant now than in his lifetime, despite the depiction in his paintings of a world that has largely disappeared, in Britain at least.

She said, "We are living in a predominantly urban world - his work is more relevant than before. It is a comfortable fiction that Lowry's work is a thing of the past."

She added, "His works are forward-thinking and universal, there are paintings by Lowry of what industry has done to nature which could be the edges of Shenzhen or Sao Paulo in 2013. There are many countries which are industrializing now, and Lowry depicts the daily patterns and rhythms of working life."

"He is a serious and important artist because without him there would be no account in paint of Britain's post-industrial condition."

"There are so few British artists who have devoted much of their art to painting one of the most significant events in British history."

Little introduced, "There has not been an exhibition of Lowry's work in London in a public museum since 1976, when Lowry died. There has been a huge gap; we have been thinking how to do an exhibition on Lowry's work for a number of years.

"We have a focused body of work, with what we think are 90 of Lowry's best landscapes and industrial scenes, really to refresh his status as Britain's pre-eminent painter of the industrial city," Little explained.

The exhibition runs at Tate Britain gallery until October 20.

Xinhua