“Crystalline Modernity” opened with two color drawings that McElheny had made on silver-gelatin photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s 1922 plans for a Glass Skyscraper. Not to be confused with Mies’s visionary Friedrichstraße project, these plans were part of a series of experiments made the following year, in the wake of Friedrichstraße’s failed construction. Such source imagery provided an apt introduction to an exhibition that reimagined the legacy of modernism by reframing its historical forms. The show’s centerpiece, Crystalline Landscape After Hablik and Luckhardt (all works 2010), a diorama

“There is always form there, whether it’s a form that can be repeated—and I’ve been trying for some time now to back away from that. I like to find something new each time, [taking up] the sum total of my experience.” This keen and succinct articulation on process, desire, and invention, delivered in a radio interview from 1996, might have issued from the mouth of Christopher Wool. Instead it is an observation on compositional method by the underground jazz musician Joe McPhee, a longtime influence on the painter. And leave it to the idiosyncratic Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey to host