Esso gallery

Esso gallery where I have been working since last June celebrated 10 years' anniversary last Friday. The owners put up various works of their various artists who had collaborated before. Esso gallery is an Italian gallery. Jennifer, one of the owners, started out the gallery 10 years ago with her friend. She herself was an artist before, having studied as an exchange student in Italy. She told me that she knew nothing about gallery business what so ever (wild!), yet her passion for art made her shift to the one who supported artists. After a year, in her trip to Italy to find Italian artists, she met Filippo. Filippo was from his arty family in Italy and he himself once had his own gallery in Torino. Falling in love with her, he decided to come to NY with her without knowing one word of English (wild2!) That is the brief history of the gallery. What is unique about Esso is reproduction of Italian culture. First of all, it has a great feeling of intimacy with each other (Jennifer and Filippo) and with their artists. They are like a big family, taking care of each other. Secondly, needless to say, Italian language fills with the gallery. Third, they smoke inside of the gallery and like coffee. Now they have stopped smoking since this year, but they are kind enough to let me smoke still. Esso would be the only gallery where you can smoke inside. Then there exists one mystery. The big question mark is “why me working?” I am Japanese who don’t speak Italian at all. (I am still struggling from English!) The only thing that I can say is that I am extremely lucky. I was brought into the gallery thanks to my former great boss, Ombretta. She curated a show, “Atomica,” there. I worked for it and ended up staying up until now. I like their artists as well as artworks that they deal with. You don’t want to work in the gallery where the taste of art is completely different from yours. More importantly, even though I am in the U.S., I am a big fan of European culture anyway. Working Esso allows me to soak into so much about Italian culture. That’s NY. You can expose to so many different cultures. Yes, indeed I am a lucky girl!