On a warm early evening in September, about five dozen people were mingling outside the tiny Alma Zevi gallery in Venice, the street aglow with the last golden rays of a Mediterranean dusk. Although it was the tail end of the Architecture Biennale, this opening, an exhibition of about 10 delicate paintings by the young British artist Esme Hodsoll, had attracted a stylish and powerful crowd from outside Italy as well as from within Venice society. There was the jewelry designer Sophie Keegan Baum, in from Hamburg, wearing one of her signature diamond name bracelets and speaking with the Venetian glass artist and entrepreneur Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda. The artist Andrew Huston, also the husband of Karole Vail, the director of the city’s world class Peggy Guggenheim Collection, was in attendance, along with the couple’s new puppy.
At the center of this notable crowd was the gallery’s namesake, the young curator Alma Zevi, who for the past few years has been one of the major forces behind a dynamic contemporary cultural movement happening in this centuries-old floating city. She grew up in Switzerland and London,
