Ai Weiwei pushes Manchester’s buttons, a ceramicist makes it personal and frames get reframed – the week in art

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Exhibition of the week

Ai Weiwei: Button Up!
If any artist can fill the vast home of Factory International, it’s Ai Weiwei, with an installation about world history, colonialism … and buttons.
Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 2 July to 6 September

Also showing

Lindsey Mendick
This artist, who can make wild and hilarious ceramics as easily as most people burn toast, explores a personal trauma.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, from 28 June to 30 August

Anne Hardy
Eerie figurative sculpture in an installation that mixes bronze and ceramics with raw found materials.
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, from 27 June to 27 September

The Artist’s Frame
It’s summer and this group show featuring Matilda Bevan, Carolyn Blake, Filippo Caramazza and many more addresses the suitably fun theme of the frame in art.
Bobinska Brownlee New River, London, until 25 July

Xanthe Somers and Yacout Hamdouch
A brightly colourful exhibition marrying Somers’s eye-fooling stoneware with Hamdouch’s abstract paintings.
October Gallery, London, from 2 July to 15 August

Image of the week

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress), 1926.

Every image of Freida Kahlo, the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, is interesting. But nobody could portray her like she portrayed herself. She took self-portraiture to new levels of interior revelation, psychological and physical. Inspired partly by the surrealists and partly by Catholic traditions of depicting pain, Kahlo took herself apart and put herself back together in images of suffering, survival and triumph. Read the full review.

What we learned

The Tate’s Frida exhibition may have overlooked some of her more problematic tendencies

An eccentric collector has chronicled his travels via the humble airline sickbag

Only two mourners attended the funeral of David Hockney

Frank Bowling once dressed as a Christmas pudding for a Chelsea Arts Club ball

Kawada Kikuji and Iwane Ai offer potent images of a legacy of shattering violence

The National Portrait Gallery pulled a Helen Cammock work amid row over Churchill

Traditional architecture in Kerala shows surprising reverence for women’s needs

A London street got filled with art – and brought the neighbours together

There is magic and mysticism hiding in medieval paintings of marble

Masterpiece of the week

The Virgin and Child in a Landscape by Jan Provoost, early 16th century

The Virgin Mary sits on a garden bench that is completely covered in greenery: this is not artistic licence but probably an accurate rendering of the kind of garden seats you would have actually seen in Renaissance Flanders. In Thomas More’s Utopia, he tells how, on a business trip there, he sat on a moss-covered bench in a garden and listened to the wondrous tales of an explorer called Raphael Hythloday. Even now in Bruges, where Provoost worked, you get a strong sense of what everyday life was like in its houses and gardens 500 to 600 years ago. Flemish art of that age works by rooting the miraculous and supernatural in that familiar and ordinary world. Here, beyond the garden, we see a realistic landscape with cosy wood and brick houses nestling in farmland and clumps of woods. It’s a very down to earth, even prosaic religious encounter. In fact, this kind of humble sublimity was pioneered in Bruges nearly a century before this was painted. It is derivative from the early-15th-century genius Jan van Eyck. Perhaps it’s a bit complacent and tame, in all its lovely sweetness.
National Gallery, London

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