Gargulinska managed to obtain permission from the communist security office to travel to London where she worked as a set and textile designer as well as a visual artist for a year. In 1973 she was required to return to Warsaw. Following a disturbing incident with the communist secret police Gargulinska decided to leave Poland permanently which was forbidden under the communist regime. A German friend helped Gargulinska across the border and took her to Hamburg. While waiting for an English Visa Gargulinska sold her first paintings and images of film posters to private clients in order to survive. Following her return to London 'Gargulinska's versatility has been apparent through her wide-ranging career. Her art has been exhibited internationally and is represented in several public collections including: the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC and the "Zacheta" National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland. Her paintings are collected worldwide, most notably by Doctor Arthur Sackler (founder of the new wing at the Royal Academy, London and the extensions to the Metropolitan and Smithsonian Museums in the United States), Cusacks, Jeremy Irons, Sir Michael Scott and Vernon Ellis, Chairman of the English National Opera. She has painted portraits in New York, designed theatre sets for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, posters for Madam Tussauds in London.' Gargulinska's work Stylistically a romantic expressionist, Gargulinska's work interchanges the abstract and figurative in unpredictable, powerful combinations. Gargulinska's paintings often include subjects from Greek mythology where the dramatic portrayal of human emotions expresses her creative imagination at its best. Red in Drama, Myth and Miracle Royal National Theatre, 2010 "The inverse of Horace's 'ut pictura poesis', here we have painting like poetry, the poetry of W B Yeats or Ezra Pound, for instance. Indeed one might say that Ewa Gargulinska has brought the poetry back into painting. Poetry is a free association of ideas and images within a loose, but not altogether disconnected, framework. Gargulinska's framework is classical mythology, the sculpture representing it, and modern psychology. These two are not entirely alien to each other, as Freud has shown. Of particular interest is that images emerge out of the paint, as it were, and rarely reach anything like naturalism. This is truly painterly poetry, the most fascinating aspect of which is the emerging mirror-image." These works, rendered in a variety of reds, from subtle orange to deep Alizarin and brown Madders