Ai Weiwei's latest exhibition, 'Button Up!', opens at Manchester's Aviva Studios from 2 July to 6 September. The Chinese artist presents an installation about world history, colonialism, and buttons, filling the vast space of Factory International.
Other notable exhibitions
Lindsey Mendick explores personal trauma through wild and hilarious ceramics at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, from 28 June to 30 August. Anne Hardy presents eerie figurative sculpture in an installation mixing bronze, ceramics, and raw found materials at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, from 27 June to 27 September.
'The Artist’s Frame' group show features Matilda Bevan, Carolyn Blake, Filippo Caramazza and more, addressing the theme of the frame in art at Bobinska Brownlee New River, London, until 25 July. Xanthe Somers and Yacout Hamdouch exhibit brightly colourful works marrying Somers’s eye-fooling stoneware with Hamdouch’s abstract paintings at October Gallery, London, from 2 July to 15 August.
Image of the week
Frida Kahlo's 'Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress)', 1926, is the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modern. The self-portrait reveals interior revelation, psychological and physical, inspired by surrealists and Catholic traditions of depicting pain.
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, at the National Gallery, London. The Virgin Mary sits on a garden bench covered in greenery, reflecting accurate Renaissance Flemish garden seats. The painting roots the miraculous in familiar, ordinary world, with cosy wood and brick houses in farmland.
