Prodded by a photographer seeking to frame a portrait of him, Guillermo Kuitca finds himself boxed in the middle of one of his installations at the Miami Art Museum. He's closed in by 20 gray mattresses perilously propped on tiny white-wood legs.

``My field of action is quite reduced here,'' jokes the Argentine artist, a leading figure in contemporary art whose affecting paintings, drawings and installations explore the intersections of private and public spaces.

The bed, that most personal (and often solitary) of settings, has been a leitmotif in Kuitca's artwork since his earliest works -- he had his first exhibition at age 13 in his native Buenos Aires -- and is the poetic metaphor that runs through the retrospective Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008, at MAM through Jan. 17.

An extension of the show featuring large-scale works, Everything (else), was on view at Freedom Tower in collaboration with the Miami Dade College Gallery System, but was dismantled to stage a luncheon for visiting first lady Michelle Obama; it's scheduled to re-open by Oct. 27. The retrospective is co-organized by Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and MAM.

In the well-known mattress installation, Untitled, Kuitca's signature deconstructed maps are painted in acrylic on top of each bed. Buttons mark major cities and capitals of the European continent. Red lines run like rivers or veins, or perhaps blood-soaked borders. Now part of the Tate Collection, the mattresses were first installed in 1991 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a woman promptly sat on one and broke one of the legs.

``It's not meant to hold people,'' Kuitca warns.

But the work holds plenty of meditative power.

Kuitca never arranges the mattresses in the same way, but instead follows ``my intuition'' about the museum or gallery space and geography. He's involved in every detail of their installation, as if each particular instance were the first occasion.

In Miami, his grouping of the mattresses has created an island -- is it void or refuge, a space waiting to be claimed or a smothered space? It all depends on how one views the landscape, but the metaphor fits this island of a city, The Independent Republic of Miami, a perennial question mark when it comes to identity.

Kuitca approaches a blank canvas the same way he does an installation -- deeply thoughtful, analytical and kneely aware of the limits of painting. The end result is poetic and humane, as if he were the Borges of painting.

``You're a philosopher at heart,'' curator Douglas Dreishpoon tells Kuitca, who stands at a press preview of the exhibition, not in the limelight of the podium, but amid attendees.

Shy, modest and soft-spoken, 48-year-old Kuitca came of age in the 1970s and early '80s during the oppressive military dictatorship in Argentina under which some 30,000 people reportedly disappeared.

The only work in the exhibition that directly addresses the so-called ``Dirty Wars'' is an ink on canvas from 1980 titled Del 1 al 30,000. Seen from afar, it looks like textile work, a woven piece of cloth that exudes a slight movement. But look close, very close, and the pattern reveals back-to-back, painstakingly drawn numbers.

``I was 18, 19 years old, and for the first time, I had a studio outside the house,'' Kuitca remembers. ``I would take French lessons in the mornings and then go to the studio, and write the numbers, one after another after another. It took me a long, long time to finish -- weeks.''

He did not have a visual concept when he began the work, he says. Thirty years later, he thinks ``it could be anything, a woven cloth, a flag.''

The numbers don't run from one to 30,000 as the work's title implies, but to 30,001.

``Numbers are symbolic,'' he says. ``No one really knows the real number of the disappeared.''

Whether intended or not, numbering has become another motif in Kuitca's work, which is heavily influenced by the theater and opera. The numbers appear, often boxed, in his paintings and drawings of opera house and theater seating, and one could almost assert that he wants to assign the disappeared seats on select orchestra and balcony rows.

But Kuitca says his interest in the theater is more universal and in tune with the philosophical concept of the world as stage.

``I like the theater not as a place to see a performance, but as a fact,'' he says. ``Theater is that place where things happen and you can be the one acting or the one looking or attending or the one experiencing the drama. I always like the idea that you can rotate roles.''

Kuitca also has created stage designs, including for a 2003 production of Richard Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman at the famous Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Three panels of flowing silk organza, titled after the opera, hang from the Freedom Tower's ceiling just below air conditioning vents that give them movement and stately gray columns that enhance their grandeur.

Other theatrical studies are 32 Seating Plans from 1994-95 and Puro teatro (Pure Theater) from 1995-98, in which Kuitca uses detailed engravings of theater plans. To create these works, he downloaded opera house seating charts, radically altered them in Photoshop and printed them on photo paper, floating the images in shallow trays with cool and hot water to create a range of effects.

His earlier paintings are framed as stage sets and evoke the passion Argentines have for the theater in a city where a 3 p.m. Monday matinee at Teatro Colón is packed with young people bearing backpacks as well as well-adorned housewives, and theater offerings include the unique Teatro de la Gorra, in which the actors get paid from what the audience puts in the hat passed around at the end of performances.

Especially in El mar dulce (The Sweet Sea) and si yo fuera el invierno (if i were winter itself), Kuitca cloaks his paintings with the poetic aloneness and nostalgic pathos of the land that gave the world the heart-stirring tango.

``I am 100 percent Argentine,'' Kuitca says, adding that although he has been tempted by opportunities to live in New York or London, he remains in Buenos Aires -- ``stubborn on that idea.

``Staying in Buenos Aires is more real,'' he says. The city where his Jewish grandparents, originally from Kiev, settled, is ``complex, a hybrid, like a collage that you cut and paste.''

So are his paintings of maps, of which the later the work, the more disjointed it is. In the first map in the show, Odessa from 1988, the ghostly image an old-fashioned stroller seems to be mimicking his grandparents' trek out of Russia. But in the mammoth-sized Everything, a white on black painting from 2004, Kuitca has dismantled the United States, as if a sinister force were at work, and so Houston and Kansas appear on the same latitude, and Oklahoma City is part of the South, and the Canadian city Calgary the heart of the nation.

Likewise, in a five-panel painting of Richard Wagner record covers in different languages, Kuitca has removed the musical imagery and painted his own geography-charged abstract works. A similar disarray makes up Heaven, a map of stars.

``It's all about the idea of variety and the connection between countries,'' says MAM curator Peter Boswell.

Adds director Terence Riley: ``Kuitca's work challenges boundaries both literally and figuratively. MAM is a hemispheric hub for art across the Americas, and this exhibition is particularly relevant.''

Kuitca's early paintings are inspired by the surrealism of Francis Bacon, and one of his latest works, the purely abstract and masterful 2006 oil on linen, Desenlace, evokes the technique of Lucio Fontana, an Argentine-Italian artist who created works by slashing canvases with a razor.

But no matter how accomplished his works, nor how distinguished the résumé of a man who has exhibited worldwide in virtually all of the hubs of contemporary art -- he has represented Argentina at the Sao Paulo and Venice biennials -- Kuitca knows all about anxiety and stage fright.

``You face that every morning. You go to your studio and you feel miserable sometimes,'' he says. ``It doesn't help to be who you are. You have a problem to solve. It's not in a museum, it's on a canvas . . . a lot of days you feel like a failure.''

When he faces the empty canvas, he feels like the figure in his paintings of the man alone in bed.

``It's a moment of privacy,'' Kuitca says. ``You are in front of an empty work. You are naked, raw.''