Ai Weiwei during the making of his Eight-Nation Alliance Flag (Russia), which will be on display at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Photograph: Gonçalo F SantosView image in fullscreenAi Weiwei during the making of his Eight-Nation Alliance Flag (Russia), which will be on display at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Photograph: Gonçalo F SantosAi Weiwei pushes Manchester’s buttons, a ceramicist makes it personal and frames get reframed – the week in artThe Chinese artist goes large on colonialism, a group show tackles a fun theme and Xanthe Somers’ stoneware fools the eye – all in your weekly dispatchExhibition of the weekAi 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 SeptemberAlso showingLindsey 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 AugustAnne 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 SeptemberThe 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 JulyXanthe 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 AugustImage of the weekView image in fullscreenFrida Kahlo, Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress), 1926. Photograph: private collectionEvery 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 learnedThe Tate’s Frida exhibition may have overlooked some of her more problematic tendenciesAn eccentric collector has chronicled his travels via the humble airline sickbagOnly two mourners attended the funeral of David HockneyFrank Bowling once dressed as a Christmas pudding for a Chelsea Arts Club ballKawada Kikuji and Iwane Ai offer potent images of a legacy of shattering violenceThe National Portrait Gallery pulled a Helen Cammock work amid row over ChurchillTraditional architecture in Kerala shows surprising reverence for women’s needsA London street got filled with art – and brought the neighbours togetherThere is magic and mysticism hiding in medieval paintings of marbleMasterpiece of the weekThe Virgin and Child in a Landscape by Jan Provoost, early 16th centuryView image in fullscreen Photograph: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/AlamyThe 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, LondonSign up to the Art Weekly newsletterIf you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.Get in touchIf you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@theguardian.comExplore more on these topicsArt and designArt Weekly newsletterPaintingAi WeiweiPhotographyArtExhibitionsfeaturesShareReuse this content