After graduating from the Pratt Institute of Fine Arts in Brooklyn in 1920, he worked for a time with Robert Edmond Jones, the pioneer American set designer who became his mentor.
Gorelik rendered in a wide variety of media and styles working with the most famous designers of the 1920s and 1930s – Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Norman Bel Geddes, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, Oliver Messel, Aleksandr Golovin, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Cleon Throckmorton.
He became an advocate for the Epic Theater style developed by Brecht and director Erwin Piscator, and he pioneered the deliberate employment of metaphor in design.
A decade later, he served as a designer and director for the Biarritz American University in France where he began teaching a seminar known as "The Scenic Imagination."
It won national recognition as an original, inspiring, and incisive approach to the purely creative side of stage production in script, direction, acting, and design.
In 1949-50, Gorelik was catapulted to great heights working with the National Theatre Conference and the Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1949–51) to produce Europe Onstage.
With that in view, I spent more than a year and a half in nine European countries: Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, England, and Ireland.
Since I am convinced that modern theatre, especially, cannot be understood except in relation to the state of mind its public, I have tried, very briefly, to give some notion of what that is like in each of the countries I have visited.
As artists and craftsmen didn't regroup and failed to rebuild, universities became havens of avant garde commentary in response to the general cultural crisis.
That's why he often said in his articles and lectures that the future of theatre in America lay in its universities—where the central concern of this remarkable form of communication was its responsibility to its audience.
As a noted critic and scholar, his essays appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Arts, Educational Theatre Journal, Speech Association Quarterly, Tulane Drama Review, Contact Magazine, Davidlo (Prague), Tester-forbundets Medlemsblad (Stockholm), Teatr Y Dramaturgia (Moscow), Buhnentechenische Rundschau (Berlin), Theatre Newsletter (London), and Hollywood Quarterly.
His more notable scene designs include such plays as Men in White, Golden Boy, Casey Jones, All My Sons, Desire Under the Elms, The Flowering Peach, A Hatful of Rain, The Plough and the Stars, Volpone, Tortilla Flat , King Hunger, Processional, and Mother.