Painter, printmaker, illustrator, graphic artist, and theater set designer Arwed Gorella was born in Swidnica, Poland in 1937. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin from 1955 to 1961, after which he took courses at the Free University of Berlin, studying under Alexander Camaro. He co-founded the New Society for Visual Arts in Berlin in 1969 and the New Realism group "Aspect" in 1972 with Peter Sorge, Hermann Albert, Bettina von Arnim, Ulrich Baer, Klaus Vogelgesang, and many others.

Gorella worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for various publications and books. He illustrated Wolf Biermann's "Great Ballad of the Dragon and the Dragon Slayer"; a contemporary edition of "One Thousand and One Nights"; and Yaak Karsunkes' "Orbiting the Guillotine." He was chief set designer for Heiner Muller's performace workshops at the Bonn Theater, and in 1999 he set the stage for Andrea Breth's production of Goethe's "Stella" at the Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, a famous Art Deco theater built in Berlin in 1928. 

From 1977 to 2001 he was a professor of art and design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, where his students included Monica Falke, Jung-Suk Ryu, and Armin Baumgarten. He died in Berlin in 2002.