What it’s actually like
Most of the rooms on this stretch of Main Street sell the West, either as it was or as contemporary painters now see it. Gallery Andrea sells flowers, and it sells them with a story attached. It is the gallery of two women with the same first name: Andrea de Kerpely-Zak, a Hungarian-born painter who has been showing in Arizona for more than 35 years, and her daughter Andrea Zakrzewski, who trained in fashion and textiles. They have owned and run it together since 2004, and the room feels like it: personal, a little crowded with color, and hosted rather than staffed.
The mother’s paintings are the heart of it. De Kerpely-Zak paints loose, bright, impressionist bouquets and wildflowers, and you will notice that none of them sits in a vase. That is deliberate. She left Hungary during the 1956 revolution, and the flowers, free-flowing and unconfined, are her symbol of that freedom. Her training runs from the painter Janos Nagy in Budapest to Arthur Lismer of Canada’s Group of Seven in Montreal, two of her paintings were commissioned for Pope John Paul II, and a copy of one hangs in the gallery. Collectors and magazines have called the work “healing,” and the gallery leans into the idea.
The daughter’s half of the room turns the same florals into things you can wear: scarves, dresses, Italian leather purses and tailored menswear. Around both, the walls carry landscapes, abstracts and figurative work by other artists from Arizona and abroad, rotated through seasonal shows of spring wildflowers, monsoon skies and Valentine’s florals. It sits in the Main Street Arts District a few doors west of Xanadu Gallery and across from Bonner David Galleries.
What to buy
A de Kerpely-Zak floral. The signature: an impressionist bouquet or a field of Arizona wildflowers, original if the budget allows.
The giclée of the painting you fell for. Nearly everything is reproduced as a giclée, and the family is explicit that this is so people who cannot afford an original can still collect.
Wearable art. A scarf printed from one of the paintings is the most packable piece of art on Main Street, and the most unusual.
A desert landscape from the guest artists. The seasonal landscape shows are the gallery’s other strength, and the counterweight to all those flowers.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Gallery Andrea is on the south side of Main Street between Goldwater Boulevard and Marshall Way, in the densest run of galleries in the district. Street parking on Main turns over fast and is hard to get in season; the reliable move is the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard, about a ten-minute walk east, or the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal and a walk south down Marshall Way. The Old Town on foot note lays out the loop and the Old Town guide covers everything around it.
The gallery keeps daytime hours Monday through Saturday, closes on Sundays, and reopens for an evening showing during the Thursday ArtWalk. The themed Gold Palette ArtWalk nights between November and April are the most festive time to visit. For a proper conversation with either Andrea, come on a weekday afternoon; the summer monsoon show is the quiet-season reason to come in July.
Eat while you’re there
Sel is a few steps away on the north side of Main and is the dinner reservation for the evening. Craft 64 at the west end of the street handles pizza and Arizona beer, Sip Coffee & Beer House on Goldwater is the coffee stop, and Malee’s Thai Bistro a block east is the gallery-hopper’s lunch.
How it got here
Gallery Andrea’s story starts a long way from Main Street. Andrea de Kerpely-Zak was born in Hungary and painted from childhood, studying with Janos Nagy from 1954 to 1956. The revolution of 1956 sent her west, and in Montreal she studied with Arthur Lismer between 1958 and 1960. Later she spent years studying painting in the museums of Europe, and on a return visit to Hungary in 1978 she gathered the roadside wildflowers that inspired a series of watercolors. One bouquet, the family likes to tell, made it through a border checkpoint only because she told the guards she was going to paint it.
Her reputation grew in North America. Two floral paintings commissioned through the Polish Congress went to Pope John Paul II, whom she met during his 1987 visit to the United States, and her wildflower paintings appeared in Arizona Highways alongside work by Georgia O’Keeffe. Her husband, Tadeusz Zakrzewski, himself a painter and a lover of classical music, encouraged both his wife and his daughter to keep at the easel, and the daughter took the floral work into fashion and textiles.
In 2004 mother and daughter opened Gallery Andrea in the Scottsdale Arts District, early in the 2000s wave that filled Main Street with a mix of traditional Western rooms and newer contemporary ones. Theirs was neither: a family gallery of impressionist florals and wearable art, plus guest landscapes and abstracts, in a district where the Thursday ArtWalk had been bringing crowds since 1975. It found its audience among people who wanted color on the wall and a story to go with it.
The gallery marked twenty years in 2024 with a summer show of florals and custom fashion, and through the 2020s it has kept its rhythm of seasonal exhibitions. Main Street’s galleries change hands often; a two-generation room that has held the same block for two decades is one of the steadier things on it. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.