Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) is a finicky dreamer, a casual poet, a playful alchemist. His less-is-more approach to art-making pushes the “less” threshold to its absolute limits. He can take the detritus from his pocket – lone buttons, crumpled paper, a shiny nail, a length of string – and spin it into gold. He often works with cheap materials, but he emphasizes those materials’ qualities, textures, and surfaces. He charms cellophane, wood grain, wire, and shadow to dance exotically across the walls. His is a mundane and mysterious art, a hodgepodge of humdrum collisions, of happy accidents, and fortunate misfortunes – all of which he transforms into objects that give pause.

“The Art of Richard Tuttle,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art of approximately 150 works he made over the last 40 years is a strange, at-odds mixture of seriousness, frivolity, and the childlike (if not childish). No other contemporary artist could simply attach a half-inflated balloon at the juncture of the floor and wall, draw a wobbly pencil line from the balloon up the wall and onto the ceiling, and bathe it blue light – “White Balloon With Blue Light” (1992) – and imbue those forms with a melancholic, end-of-the-party power. Or get painted plywood to read fluidly like windblown flags or laundry flapping on the line – the beautiful “New Mexico, New York” series (1998). No one else could nail a 3-inch-long bit of rope to the wall-crotch high in “3rd Rope Piece” (1974) – and create a dramatic tension between utter insouciance and crucifixion-esque poignancy.

In Mr. Tuttle’s art, shadows, dents, wrinkles, and tears play essential if not primary roles. The homemade frames – often more powerful than the art they contain – are passageways or bridges between art and environment. Though his works may begin in real or implied frames, their straying forms – like passing clouds or curious children or dogs tugging at the leash – never stay put. As if the museum were a park or a playground, his drawings-cum-sculptures-cum-installations strain to explore the space, to play with the viewers, to roam.

Mr. Tuttle’s artworks change with each installation. A number of works on view at the Whitney were literally created – painted, drawn, nailed, or taped – on the walls of this exhibition. The rest have changed as new curators and lighting designers matched them with new corners, floors, ceilings, and walls. Even if you have seen the works before (and this retrospective has pieces from every major period of his career), you have not seen them installed exactly as they are now at the Whitney.

In the galvanized-iron “Letters (The Twenty-Six Series)” (1966), the first work on view, the wall space between the enigmatic letter forms is almost as important (certainly it is as essential) to the reading of the forms as the forms themselves. This is also true of the tall Plexiglas vitrine of six small works from the 1970s, including “Piece,” a wire oval which folds where the wall meets the floor (and which makes one aware of the grain of the granite floor and of how well the wall has been plastered), and “Corner,” a folded piece of steel whose surface glints are made more palpable because of the comparable reflections in the Plexiglas.

Mr. Tuttle is keen to show how materials alter in different permutations. In the series “Waferboard” (1996), the grain of the pressboard, as if veins or individual elements, can be seen in the leaf-like and featherlike forms. In other pieces, such as “Relative in Our Society” (1990), wood is experienced as tree branch, plywood, and pegboard. In the painted wood relief “Two With Any To” series (1999), projected shadows and the grains of raw plywood create as much tension in the works as their fixed colors and forms.

Mr. Tuttle’s artworks are often said to be original for their blurring of drawing, painting, and sculpture and for their exploitation of found materials. There is little if any truth to these claims, which focus on the wrong aspect of his art. Picasso and Braque (as well as the graphic designers the Beggarstaff Brothers) were the first to work with collage, a process that extended and questioned exactly what went into a picture, as well as where it began and ended; Kurt Schwitters made beautiful art out of garbage; the Russian Constructivists and early Abstractionists sculpted with shadow, wall, and void; Joseph Cornell made more transformative use of his materials; and Calder drew richer and more volumetric solids with wire, wall, and shadow.

What is important about Mr. Tuttle is not some claim to originality, but his inventiveness, wit, and poetic breadth. In one of the best pieces in the show, the five-part relief “Forms in Classicism” (1989), he moves us – though possibly with tongue in cheek – between metaphors of leaf, nude, vase, mother and child, and sun and moon.

“Forms in Classicism,” five frontal wall relief sculptures hung in series, explores duality and the relationship between internal and external, between layering and dislodging. There is also a sense here of rhythm and growth or transformation through time. I feel as if the artist were truly engaging with the forms as a whole, as if he were putting casualness aside and actually listening to the needs of the sculpture. In the first relief, a yellow, biomorphically inscribed circle hangs tentatively from a dark rectangle. In another, a leafy dagger springs forward as if released from a straightjacket or as if it were the stamen of a flower. In the last piece, as if echoing the first, a wavy, knife-like or spinal form hangs off of, or nudges, its mate, a relationship that feels simultaneously tenuous, invasive, parasitic, playful, and erotic.

Mr. Tuttle gets a lot out of a little in his best pieces; the works retain their origins in the commonplace yet have a meandering, unbridled, and liberating power. He is a master of the minor and the incidental; of the sweet nothing and the elusive. Part of his work’s muscle is in its bare simplicity and its openness, in its refusal to commit to larger themes or to nailing things down beyond that of grazing from minor incident to minor incident.

“Richard Tuttle” is a show that embraces art’s mysterious lightness, playfulness, and surfaces – all of which are essential elements. The questions that arise in this work are how much of “less” is too little; how much surface is too thin; when does ease become merely easy; and when do subtlety, enigma, cleverness, and freedom become ambiguity, emptiness, and impoverishment?

Until February 5, (945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).