In the late 1940s, Donald Judd began to practice as a painter. His first solo exhibition, of expressionist paintings, at the Panoras Gallery in New York, opened in 1957. From the mid-1950s to 1961, as he started to explore the medium of the woodcut, Judd progressively moved from figurative to increasingly abstract imagery, first carving organic rounded shapes, then moving on to the painstaking craftsmanship of straight lines and angles. His artistic style soon moved away from illusory media and embraced constructions in which materiality was central to the work. He would not have another one person show until the Green Gallery in 1963, an exhibition of works that he finally thought worthy of showing.