Ai Weiwei pushes Manchester buttons, potter makes it personal, frames are reshaped – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Ai Weiwei: Up button!
If any artist could fill Factory International’s spacious house, it’s Ai Weiwei, with an installation about world history, colonialism… and buttons.
Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 2 July to 6 September

also appear

Lindsey Mendick
This artist, who can create wild and delightful ceramics with the same ease with which most people burn toast, explores personal trauma.
Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate, from 28 June to 30 August

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

Artist frame
It’s summer and this group show featuring Matilda Bevan, Caroline Blake, Filippo Caramazza and many more takes up the subject of the appropriate playful setting in art.
New Bobinska Brownlee River, London, until 25 July

Xanthe Somers and Yaqut Hamdoush
A brightly colored exhibition that combines Somers’ illusionist stoneware with Hamdouche’s abstract paintings.
October Fair, London, from 2 July to 15 August

Picture of the week

Every portrait of Frida Kahlo, the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, is interesting. But no one could portray her as she portrayed herself. She took the self-portrait to new levels of inner revelation, both psychological and physical. Inspired partly by the Surrealists and partly by the Catholic tradition of depicting pain, Kahlo dismantled and reassembled herself into images of suffering, survival and triumph. Read the full review.

What we learned

The Tate Frida Gallery may have overlooked some of her more problematic tendencies

An eccentric collector has chronicled his travels via the airline’s humble sick bag

Only two mourners attended David Hockney’s funeral

Frank Bowling once dressed up as a Christmas pudding to attend a Chelsea Arts Club ball

Kawada Kikuji and Iwane Ai provide poignant portraits of a legacy of devastating violence

The National Portrait Gallery has withdrawn the work of Helen Cammock amid the row over Churchill

The traditional architecture of Kerala shows an amazing reverence for the needs of women

A London street has been filled with art – bringing neighbors together

There is magic and mysticism hidden in medieval marble paintings

Masterpiece of the week

The Virgin and Child in a Landscape by Jean Provost, early 16th century

The Virgin Mary sits on a park bench completely covered in greenery: this is not artistic license but perhaps an accurate rendering of the type of park benches you would have actually seen in Renaissance Flanders. In Thomas More’s book Utopia, he tells how, during a business trip there, he sat on a moss-covered bench in a park and listened to the wondrous tales of an explorer named Raphael Hythloday. Even now in Bruges, where Provost worked, you get a strong sense of what daily life was like in its houses and gardens 500 to 600 years ago. Flemish art of the era works by grounding the miraculous and the supernatural in that familiar and ordinary world. Here, outside the park, we see a realistic landscape with cozy wood and brick houses set in farmland and clumps of forest. It is a very modest, even vulgar, religious encounter. In fact, this kind of modest solemnity was pioneered in Bruges almost a century before it was painted. It is derived from the early 15th century genius Jan van Eyck. Perhaps he is content and a little tame, with all his beautiful sweetness.
National Gallery, London

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