The Courtauld is to stage the first exhibition devoted entirely to Paula Rego's Dog Woman pastel series, the raw and unsettling group of works the artist made in 1994 and 1995. The show opens on 5 February 2027, with tickets now on sale.

The Dog Woman pastels show women crouching, snarling and baring their teeth, adopting the posture and behaviour of dogs. Rego made them after reading about the way women were expected to behave, and the series became one of the most forceful statements of her career: a refusal of politeness and a claim to anger, appetite and physical presence. The pastels are among her most recognised works, yet they have never before been shown together as a single subject.

The exhibition will bring the series into focus at the Courtauld, a gallery with a strong record of presenting Rego's work and of looking closely at drawing as a medium. Showing the pastels as a group will let visitors follow the variations Rego worked through the theme, from crouching figures to women on all fours, and see how the medium itself, soft and immediate, suited the urgency of the subject.

Rego, who was born in Lisbon and lived and worked in London for most of her life, remains one of the most important figurative painters of recent decades. The Dog Woman show offers a chance to encounter a defining body of work on its own terms, without the wider survey format that usually frames it. The exhibition is the latest in a series of focused shows at the Courtauld that look closely at a single body of work, following the gallery's tradition of pairing close looking with deep research.