Art has a class problem. Historically, the representation of working-class life has been filtered through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze. Working-class subjects have been under- or misrepresented, stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether. And, for anyone looking for a career in the art world, a working-class background can present a significant barrier to entry.1 2

Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen, a major new exhibition at Two Temple Place, seeks to explore and address these inequities head-on. By celebrating and reevaluating working-class representation in postwar Britain the show sets out to overturn long-standing misrepresentations, enrich limited and limiting narratives, and trigger fresh thinking about the lives of working-class people, showcasing more authentic and nuanced depictions of working-class experiences and identities.

Conceived and curated by Samantha Manton, the exhibition includes more than 150 art works of painting, photography, film, sculpture and ceramics, exclusively from working-class artists and those from working-class backgrounds. In keeping with Two Temple Place’s role as a major London platform for the UK’s regional collections, the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging body of work from museums and galleries, archives, artists’ estates and contemporary artists up and down the country.
Reframing narratives, challenging stereotypes, exploring identities

Connor Coulston, I need to spice up my life, 2022. © Conner Coulston. Photograph by Denisa Ilie.
Lives Less Ordinary provides a platform to champion contemporary artists from working-class backgrounds, while also encouraging audiences to reappraise the work of underappreciated 20th-century figures such as Beryl Cook and Monica Ross, and discover works, perhaps for the first time, by little-known artists including Sandra George and Eric Tucker.

Artists like Roman Manfredi, Joanne Coates and Mahtab Hussain make visible overlooked working-class communities, defiantly challenging reductive stereotypes, while Hannah Starkey, Ken Grant, Masterji and others draw attention to quiet, interior lives. Artworks by the likes of Rene Matic, Chila Burman, Corbin Shaw demonstrate the plurality of working-class identity, illuminating how class intersects with gender, race, religion, sexuality and migrant status. Early work by this year’s Turner Prize nominee Jasleen Kaur features and taking centre stage in Two Temple’s Place’s atrium will be an inaugural London-based presentation of Matthew Arthur Williams’ two-channel film and sound installation Soon Come.

Acts of censorship and erasure are brought to the fore in works by photographers Jo Spence and Sirkka Lisa-Konttien – and exemplified by Bert Hardy’s famous 1948 photograph Gorbals Boys, an image deemed too hopeful to suit the bleak narrative of Picture Post, for which it was taken.

Lives Less Ordinary: Working-class Britain Re-seen at Two Temple Place. Photography by Richard Eaton.
“My aim has been to feature artists and photographers whose work challenges reductive, negative and one-dimensional representations of working-class lives and communities; those that offer positive, celebratory imagery, but also those that reflect the complexity, nuance and depth. Brought together, they challenge a canon which typically upholds the notion of working-class life as depressing, homogenous, undeserving of attention, only about poverty, crisis and deprivation. The exhibition is a call to action for museums and galleries to ensure that more authentic expressions of working-class life are present on their walls and in their collections.”
– Samantha Manton, curator, Lives Less Ordinary
The result is a complex, nuanced and compelling examination of what Richard Hoggart called the ‘sprawling and multitudinous and infinitely detailed character of working-class life’ in all its pride, playfulness, humour and hope.