Ai Weiwei pushes Manchester’s buttons, a ceramicist makes it personal and frames get reframed – the week in art
Weiwei goes big while tackling colonialism, a group show has a fun theme and Xanthe Somers’s stoneware fools the eye – all in your weekly dispatch
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
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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