The artist Richard Tuttle has most often worked on a small scale, part of his quest, as he puts it, "to account for the invisible."

His littlest objects have sometimes perplexed art-world types, who like to think big (perhaps to justify those monumental price tags). In an interview Mr. Tuttle recalled a piece he showed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1970's, which he described as "some paint at the end of a coffee stirrer, placed on a 40-foot wall." At the opening, after studying this tiny thing, an impeccably dressed man approached the artist and asked him: "Mr. Tuttle, do you have any idea of the cost of real estate in this part of town?"

The man might be relieved to know that Mr. Tuttle, 63, whose work can often fit in a palm, is trying the other extreme: he has begun installing "Splash," his first public art project, a mural 90 by 150 feet with about 140,000 pieces of colored glass and white ceramic tiles. It will stretch up the side of a luxury condominium building designed by Walter Chatham for a private, guarded island community in Miami Beach called Aqua.

Mr. Tuttle sees no contradiction. "There have always been questions of invisibility with my work, its small size, but there's also an invisibility connected to supersize," he said. "There's a threshold with how big things can get and we can comprehend them. Invisible small or invisible large doesn't make much a difference."

Questions of scale have never been so relevant to Mr. Tuttle, who has never seemed more visible than he is now. Besides the Aqua project, a new Tuttle work is in Art Basel Miami Beach, the contemporary art fair that started this week. It is expected to draw 30,000 collectors, designers, gallery owners, reporters and critics - and many corporate sponsors. Mr. Tuttle's part of it is installed in an unlikely venue, the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, a museum that specializes in modern art and design before 1945. The party celebrating his "Beauty-in-Advertising" installation is tonight.

Last month a Tuttle show opened at the Drawing Center in SoHo with a wide variety of his pieces on view through Feb. 26. "It is fertile, forward-looking terrain," Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, going on to call Mr. Tuttle "an influential, even inspiring figure" for young artists. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is planning a Tuttle retrospective starting in July, the first full-blown museum exhibition of his work, including sculpture, assemblage, works on paper, books and furniture. The retrospective will travel to several other major American museums, including the Whitney in the fall.

"This is a Richard Tuttle moment," said Cathy Leff, director of the Wolfsonian, adding, "There were probably other Richard Tuttle moments that one just didn't notice."
Since Mr. Tuttle arrived on the downtown art scene in the mid-1960's he has been regarded in some quarters as hugely important and in other quarters not regarded at all. On the day of his opening at the Drawing Center, the Wall Street Journal described him as a "relatively little-known mid-career minimalist artist." Mr. Tuttle's value in the art market has gone up and down, but lately mostly up. Two years ago a tin wall piece called "Letters (The 26 Series)" sold at auction for $1 million.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Modern in San Francisco, explains his semi-fame, semi-obscurity like this: "The work is fundamentally about independence. It is not necessarily going to respond to the market and its demands. It is going to willfully resist any kind of attempt at definition. It refuses to sit still inside a known medium. It is not just painting or drawing or sculpture. It refuses to sit comfortably inside any particular category defined by either the market or by understanding of previous art."

No wonder it isn't easy to pin Mr. Tuttle down. His elliptical, philosophical manner of conversation reflects his work, which finds expansive possibilities in the most ordinary things, drawing on materials of every variety, including wire, matches, plain bond paper and other throwaway items. "Frankly, I don't always understand everything he says," said Dorothy Vogel, who with her husband, Herbert, has been collecting Mr. Tuttle's work for 35 years.

Similarly, she said: "The work is very challenging. You can't just look at it and understand it. You focus on slight details, and then you go into the street and looking at cracks in the sidewalk becomes beautiful. His work taught me how to look at art and things around me."
The opinion of the Vogels isn't to be taken lightly. This humble, elderly couple - he was a postal worker, she a librarian - achieved fame in 1992 when their carefully assembled collection of Conceptual, Minimalist and post-1960's art was accepted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. They will lend 70 Tuttle works to the San Francisco show. Mr. Tuttle has become a close friend. When Mrs. Vogel was to have eye surgery, he went with her to the doctor to make sure she was getting appropriate treatment.
Mr. Tuttle has led what appears to be a glamorous life. He has homes in New York and New Mexico and has shown his work throughout Europe. The party tonight for the unveiling of his Wolfsonian installation promises to be an over-the-top display: festivities organized by Kate and Andy Spade of Kate Spade New York, with the designer Todd Oldham playing D.J. and fireworks by Grucci.

Mr. Tuttle hangs out at times with Craig Robins, president of the Dacra Development Corporation, a significant player in the emergence of South Beach in the 1980's. This real estate developer is force behind Aqua, promoted as a luxury "village" of homes and condominiums (prices from $700,000 to $7 million), designed to pay homage to the tropical Modern style of Miami Beach, circa the 1940's.
Mr. Robins, a significant collector of contemporary art, chose Mr. Tuttle for the public art project at Aqua because he regards the artist as a kind of guru. "I don't mean to turn it into a religious conversation, but you have these high-priest type figures," Mr. Robins said in an interview in his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. "I see Richard Tuttle and John Baldessari and Marcel Duchamp in that way."

Though the weather was New York-chilly, Mr. Robins was dressed Miami-style, with his stylish-casual shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. Waving his hand at his apartment's sunlit walls, which display many works by contemporary artists, he said: "I put it up. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get bored. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I put something away for a while and put it back up and feel astounded. With Tuttle, I never get tired of it."

Mr. Tuttle has become something of a jet-setter. Three days after the Drawing Center opening on Nov. 5, he flew to San Francisco to discuss the retrospective with museum curators; from there to Florida to work on the mural; back to New York on the 16th for the reopening at the Museum of Modern Art. He manages to negotiate the sleek, expensive universe that has helped sustain his career and elevated the monetary value of his work, while maintaining an unpretentious aura. "This is not about making money," he said. "But I can also say that making money is fun. It is fun, but making art is more fun."

Describing the magnitude of the Aqua project, for example, he uses a practical and recognizable comparison. "To discuss 140,000 tiles, that is at the edge of imagination, what that means," he said. "In a bathroom you use maybe 200 tiles." He readily moves from a discussion of art and the cosmos to the tribulations and pleasures of having a teenage daughter; he and his wife, the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, have one, Martha, age 15.

Even when his clothes are nicely pressed, as they were at his opening in SoHo, Mr. Tuttle gives the impression of being rumpled. The bag he carried to an interview at a hotel near his home in TriBeCa contained a book about quantum mechanics as well as his polite chocolate -brown poodle, Choco. (Mr. Tuttle has also taken Choco to a concert at Carnegie Hall; the dog is so quiet that Mr. Tuttle says he once left him behind, in his bag, at a restaurant.) Mr. Tuttle has resisted the trend, especially among younger artists, to speak in sound bites meant to sell himself and his work. He prefers philosophical mouthfuls about wider questions, like the nature of art itself and the role he and others play in its development.
He rejects the proposition that his work has influenced many young artists. "Basically I don't believe in it," he said. "I don't see it. I don't see the influence. If somebody sees my work and somebody else's work and sees a connection, they presume it's about the work, but it's not. It's about them. I find that beautiful and interesting and telling."

But Ms. Grynsztein in San Francisco lists many artists whose work evokes Mr. Tuttle's, including Kiki Smith, Jim Hodges, David Hammons, Tom Friedman and Jessica Stockholder. "What they all share in common with Richard is a great interest and fearlessness about making things that are precarious, that are as transient and fragile as life itself," she said.

Luca Buvoli says he was influenced by Mr. Tuttle, specifically in doing his "Not-a-Superman" project, handmade comic books, films and sculptures about a shy and vulnerable superhero. Mr. Buvoli, born in Italy in 1963, was introduced to Mr. Tuttle's work after moving to the United States in 1988. "He asks people to approach him slowly," Mr. Buvoli said. "I heard him talking at a lecture, and some viewers were quite perplexed because it is not something that is immediately apparent. It's an alternative to a more bombasitc statement. Because of that the work has more enduring power."

Perhaps Mr. Tuttle, son of an engineer, is dubious about notions of influence because he felt destined for art at an early age. "I remember the first day in kindergarten the teacher handed out the paper and crayons and I felt this was the beginning of my life," he said. "When I had my first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and I looked across the room I saw this piece was exactly like the first drawing I made in kindergarten. It just took 20 year - I had to wait."

Now that he's tasted supersize, will he abandon small? "There is something very American about big," he said. "Pollock put that idea in his paintings and Rothko put that in his paintings, but I also see paintings that are big without any understanding, and I find it disgusting, a waste of materials and resources. Unless it means something, don't do it. For me, for the Aqua project to be successful, it will have to reach the invisible. I don't want the world to say, "Oh, give Richard Tuttle some walls in China." I'd rather move a pencil around."

- Julie Salamon