In the late 1960s Adolph Gottlieb—a painter associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the late 1940s and 1950s—began experimenting with three-dimensional works. Most were realized in the form of small maquettes; Petaloid is one of only three large-scale sculptures that Gottlieb produced. His sculptures can be interpreted as an extension of his experiments with form and shape in his paintings. In the early 1950s Gottlieb painted a series of imaginary landscapes divided horizontally into distinct celestial and terrestrial zones, a duality that crystallized in his Burst pictures of 1956–57, which depict circular disk-like forms suspended over explosive, irregular black masses. In Petaloid a planar, rectilinear, horizontal element supports a yellow petal-like form resting on the top edge, flanked on one side by a black vertical rectangle and, on the other, a black circle. The imagery of this sculpture roughly approximates that of Gottlieb’s paintings: the brightly colored central element stands out against the black geometric components in much the same way that the colorful disks and black masses contrast with each other on the artist’s canvases. 

Speaking about his goals for his paintings, Gottlieb said, “It isn’t purely just feeling in the emotional sense, in the sense of feeling joy or grief or any specific emotion. It’s really, as I see it, an attempt to express abstractly almost all my experience which is emotional. And, at the same time, I attach a great deal of importance to the thought process and a kind of intellectual approach to painting; and I can't separate them.”