Sometimes I think the British artist-musician Martin Creed makes art for dummies, not excluding myself. At the same time, his accumulations and arrangements of everyday objects and materials initially seem so rudimentary and forthright that they can also make you feel smart.

The dumb-smart continuum is very much in play in Mr. Creed’s concurrent shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village and the uptown gallery of Hauser & Wirth. On this occasion he has made art from such mundane items as bricks, I-beams, colored yarn, rolls of toilet paper and light bulbs, rarely using more than one material or kind of object per work. Together these exhibitions provide an unusually complete picture of his subversive wit and rather restrained, almost classic sense of beauty, not least because he uses the two locations for call-and-response exchanges.

For example, the final work at Hauser & Wirth is a large pyramid of stacked rolls of white toilet paper that is surprisingly eye-popping. (It helps that the cardboard tubes read as black spots.) The first piece at Gavin Brown is its exact opposite, a pyramid made of cinder blocks. The works serve as each other’s punch lines in addition to being the largest possible pyramids that either space could accommodate. They also quietly spoof the big expensive artworks that typically fill New York’s large galleries. A similar sendup — in this case, of installation art as architectural intervention — is a large black balloon shape painted on a wall at Hauser & Wirth that at first looks startlingly like an actual hole.

Mr. Creed, who was born in 1968 and has exhibited in New York since 1997, has devised one of today’s more literal-minded hybrids of Minimalism and Conceptualism. His pieces achieve an unusual balance of materials and ideas, partly because thought is emphasized over traditional skill. Yet the complexity and artistic potential of the physical world is a constant theme.

Martin Creed His light-bulb installation at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, one of two shows in Manhattan devoted to the artist.

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

At Hauser & Wirth, the six widely available sizes of steel I-beams, each cut to a length equal to its height, are stacked, perpendicular to a wall like a staircase, splitting the difference between sculpture and architecture while taking up almost no space. There are more stacked I-beam pieces at Brown, including one that seems to penetrate a wall, another optical illusion. Next to this work is a wall installation made from every type of white light bulb produced by one company: 49 in all, screwed into electrical sockets set flush with the wall in a grid formation. The distinctly different bulbs disrupt the repetition expected of grids while creating a unified glow.

A similar affirmation of individuality, but far more emotionally charged, unfolds in a new video that shows about a dozen people with atypical gaits crossing the street just outside Mr. Brown’s gallery, one at a time. Some are clearly managing without their usual aids, be it a cane, crutch or wheelchair. But one way or another, they all make it across — moving, it seems, in rhythm to the sounds of a loud, cheerful rock song written and performed by Mr. Creed. In addition to uniqueness, fortitude is succinctly demonstrated in addition to uniqueness.

Human individuality and the challenge of capturing it may be an increasing focus for Mr. Creed, who is pursuing traditional mediums with a new zeal, as evidenced by a series of drawn and painted portraits in which conventional aesthetic decision-making has been deliberately thwarted.

These works invariably look a little odd, haphazardly expressionistic or even childish. Mr. Creed clearly made some of them with his eyes closed, including two pencil drawings that resemble skewed wire portraits by Alexander Calder. Others suggest that he was working from memory, without the model. A particularly messy one placed high on the wall, “Jumping up Portrait of Luciana,” leaves little doubt that each stroke was applied by the artist in midair.

Perhaps to prove that he has the requisite artistic skills after all, Mr. Creed has included a small, dark, relatively descriptive self-portrait. In its way, this drawing may spoof the idea of the artist as expressionist madman, or everything Mr. Creed is not.

Martin Creed’s work is on view through Saturday at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village; 212- 627-5258, gavinbrown.biz/home.html; and at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan; 212-794-4970, hauserwirth.com.