Arwed D. Gorella, (born March 25, 1937 in Schweidnitz, Silesia; † February 3, 2002 in Berlin) was a German New Realist painter, book illustrator, caricaturist, set designer, graphic artist and university professor.

LIFE: 

After graduating from the Bad Sachsa Pedagogy, Gorella studied from 1955 to 1961 at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the Free University of Berlin and was a master student of Alexander Camaro.

Since the 1960s, in addition to his own artistic work, Gorella has worked as a lecturer at the Berlin University of Education. In 1977 he accepted an appointment as a full professor of fine arts at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts (HBKB). He worked there until 2001. His students include Monika Falke, Jung-Suk Ryu and Armin Baumgarten. In the HBKB's obituary notice for Arwed Gorella, the then president of the university attested to him having "contributed significantly to the high international reputation of the university".

ARTWORK:

Gorella was one of the representatives of New Realism and held the view that one should “interfere in social and political matters,” and he created numerous anti-militarist and anti-clerical depictions. In 1969 he was one of the founding members of the New Society for Fine Arts. In 1972, together with Peter Sorge, Hermann Albert, Bettina von Arnim, Ulrich Baehr, Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick, Joachim Schmettau, Maina-Miriam Munsky and Klaus Vogelgesang, he founded the critical-realist artist group Stimme, which existed until 1978.

Exhibitions of his works took place in Berlin, Lübeck, Hanover and Hamburg, among others. He also worked as a cartoonist and book illustrator. For example, he illustrated Wolf Biermann's Great Ballad of the Dragon and the Dragon Slayer, a new edition of One Thousand and One Nights in the translation of Gustav Weil and Yaak Karsunke's Circling the Guillotine.

As a set designer, he also created various backdrops for performances of Heiner Müller's works at the Bonn Theaterwerkstatt and, in 1999, the set design for Andrea Breth's production of Goethe's Stella at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.