The modesty and open-ended quality of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work have set the tone and direction of much significant art created in the 1990s. Like other examples of the work he created during his tragically short life, Untitled (Petit Palais) rejects a monumental and heroic tone in favor of a quietly personal approach. The artist identified his inspiration for this series as the delicate, decorative strands of light that graced an ordinary street fair in Paris. He inaugurated the light strands in 1991, the year that his companion died of AIDS. This example, comprised of forty-two frosted lightbulbs distributed on a 62-foot cord, is one of a group of twenty-four light strings that differ from one another in the titles given them by the artist and in the number and wattage of the bulbs themselves. Each sculpture can be arranged in any way a particular installer wishes, and thus holds the potential for unlimited variations.

Gonzalez-Torres's persistent ambition to link private or sociocultural associations to neutral objects was a subcurrent throughout his career. Untitled (Petit Palais) is therefore designed to admit a wide range of meanings, incorporating both the artist's and the viewer's responses and memories as well as the poignant tension between the capacity of light for revelation, purity, and transcendence and its inevitable dimming over time. Although the simplicity, anonymity, and serial nature of the light strands recall the formal structures and procedures of Minimalism, they are distinguished from that movement by their deeply expressive resonance. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 146.