Ai Weiwei pushes Manchester’s buttons, a ceramicist makes it personal and frames are repurposed – art week | Art and design

Show of the week

Ai Weiwei: Click Up!
If any artist could fill the main hall of Factory International, it is Ai Weiwei, and put the history of the world, colonialism … and buttons.
Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 2 July to 6 September

Also show

Lindsey Mendick
This artist, who can create wild and beautiful dishes as easily as most people can toast, sees human suffering.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, from 28 June to 30 August

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

Artist Frame
It’s summer time and this panel shows Matilda Bevan, Carolyn Blake, Filippo Caramazza and many others talk about the interesting topic of the frame in art.
Bobinska Brownlee New River, London, until 25 July

Xanthe Somers and Yacout Hamdouch
A brilliant show marrying Somers’ eye-popping gem with Hamdouch’s stunning visuals.
October Gallery, London, from 2 July to 15 August

Picture of the week

Every picture of Freida Kahlo, the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modernit’s interesting. But no one could show him as he showed himself. He took his own image to new levels of inner revelation, mind and body. Influenced in part by the surrealists and in part by the Catholic tradition of depicting suffering, Kahlo isolated and reassembled herself in images of suffering, survival and triumph. Read the full review.

What we learned

The Tate’s Frida exhibition may have overlooked its difficulties

A reporter documented his travels through a small airline bag

Only two mourners attended David Hockney’s funeral

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

Kawada Kikuji and Iwane Ai provide powerful images of the devastating legacy of violence

The National Portrait Gallery pulled Helen Cammock’s work between the lines on Churchill

Traditional architecture in Kerala shows remarkable respect for the needs of women

A London street was filled with art – bringing neighbors together

There is magic and magic hidden in the ancient marble art

Mine of the week

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

The Virgin Mary is sitting on a garden bench covered in greenery: this is not an artistic license but perhaps an accurate rendering of the garden furniture you would have seen in Renaissance Flanders. In Thomas More’s Utopia, he describes how, on a business trip there, he sat on a moss-covered bench in a garden and listened to the wonderful stories of an explorer named Raphael Hythloday. Even now in Bruges, where the Provoost worked, you get a good sense of what daily life was like in his houses and gardens 500 to 600 years ago. Flemish art of that age works to remove the supernatural and the supernatural from the familiar and familiar world. Here, behind the garden, we see real estates with wooden and brick houses nestled in fields and forests. It is very difficult in the world, even a prosaic religious encounter. In fact, such modesty took place in Bruges almost a century before this painting. It comes from the 15th century artist Jan van Eyck. Perhaps it is careless and dirty, in all its beautiful taste.
National Gallery, London

Subscribe to the Art Weekly newsletter

If you are not already receiving our technical and design newsletters by email, Please write it here.

Contact each other

If you have any questions or comments about any of our articles, please email newsletters@theguardian.com