Filippo and Jennifer - collage by Giulio Paolini, 2024
esso opened in 1996 on the Lower East Side, founded by Jennifer Bacon and Jennie Schueler. Filippo Fossati joined in 1997. The program had two commitments: emerging and under-shown artists, and traffic in both directions across the Atlantic - Italian artists exhibited in New York, American artists exhibited in Europe, with catalogues and monographs published alongside the exhibitions.
In 2009 we gave up the gallery space and continued as a smaller operation: work with individual artists, commissioned projects, advice on private and public collections. Without a room to fill on a schedule, we could put work where it made more sense than a closed space.
In 2013 we opened a base in the Langhe, in Piedmont - a sculpture park, a library open to the public, a kitchen. In 2019 we opened a second one in Andes, in the Catskills.
Both work on the same assumption: art is easier to look at when it is not kept apart from everything else - when it sits near a table, a road, a field, a shelf you can take a book from.
Jennifer Bacon studied fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Temple University. She co-founded Esso in 1996 and has directed its exhibition program since. She advises private and public collections and has assembled a collection of artist-designed jewelry.
“Jennifer” oil on canvas by Mauro Chessa, 2004
Filippo Fossati is a writer and publisher. In the early 1980s he co-founded the publishing house Il Quadrante and its magazine Mostre e Musei, later Contemporanea. He opened his first gallery in Turin in 1988, founded Impresa per l'Arte Contemporanea in 1994, and in 1997 started Ground Art and Culture with Maurizio Pellegrin. He has taught at the National Academy in New York, organized too many exhibitions to remember, and manages several artists' archives and collections.