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.''

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