Wieland Förster (1930–2023) is one of the significant German sculptors of the second half of the twentieth century. His work returns insistently to the human being – often to the vulnerable, suffering body. This concern is inseparable from his biography: as a fifteen-year-old he witnessed the bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945, and from 1946 to 1950 he was wrongfully imprisoned in a Soviet special camp. On account of his humanist, system-critical stance, the GDR imposed an exhibition and sales ban on him from 1968 to 1973; in 1974 he became a member of the Akademie der Künste, later its vice-president, and in 1985 he received a professorship. In bronze and stone he created figures of great intensity, among them „Der große trauernde Mann" (The Great Mourning Man, 1993) for the victims of the Dresden bombing; his works mark public sites from the Glienicke Bridge to Hamburg's HafenCity. Förster also worked as a draughtsman, printmaker and writer.