The artwork privately exhibited at 220 Gristmill Lane and the people touring the mansion likely had one thing in common: a desire to find a home.
Edna Mashaal Realty, a Great Neck Plaza-based real estate firm, hosted an art exhibition with the team of French contemporary artist Marc Ferrero on Wednesday night, as part of a collaborative effort to showcase both the home it’s trying to sell and art.
“A lot of thought went into it, as to which house we should pick to promote this artist who is so famous,” Edna Mashaal, the head of Edna Mashaal Realty, which is trying to sell the home, said in an interview. “We think this is an amazing home and the right match.”
The event took place at the home of Rahlo Khalili, a Middle Eastern Artist Calligrapher and pen collector.
Several people who visited the waterfront Saddle Rock mansion, on the market for about $5 million, explored a stone waterfront terrace, nearly thousands of square feet of glowing interior and banquet sized rooms.
They also saw the exhibited work at its heart: over a dozen paintings for sale by Ferrero, a pioneer of the “storytelling art” movement that blends together artistic styles to create a fictional story.
“I believe that art and real estate are connected, especially when we are talking about beautiful homes,” Lise Amsellem, a salesperson with Edna Mashaal Realty who first raised the idea and has known Ferrero for about a decade, said in an interview. “Whoever buys those kinds of homes want to put beautiful paintings on the wall.”
In a previous interview Ferrero said his paintings utilizes impressionism, surrealism, expressionism, pop art and cubism, while showcasing movement and movie-style framing. While the stories are fiction, Ferrero said, they draw from real life themes like the clash between humanity and technology.
The works here ranged from colorful pieces that could be lined along a small couch, to elaborate ones with multiple characters nearly wide as the mansion’s large windows.
“Being an artist, when you see all the new technologies and artificial intelligence, modernity is very interesting,” Ferrero said in an interview over WhatsApp, “but you have to preserve the human parts.”
Ultimately, Mashaal said she hopes they can do more dual exhibitions like this.
“We hope to do this more often,” Mashaal said, “to try to bring our art and our homes together.”
Amsellem requests that anyone interested in seeing or ordering a painting call her at (516) 423-9033.
