What it’s actually like
Main Street is the Western half of Scottsdale’s arts district, and walking its last block before Scottsdale Road you pass bronze horses, impressionist landscapes and cowboy canvases one after another. Then, at 7160 East Main, the walls go white and the work goes abstract. Gebert Contemporary has held this ground for about a quarter of a century, and it remains the clearest case on the street that Main is not only a Western row.
The room is open and spare, with the floor kept clear so the work can breathe, and the program is precise: contemporary abstract painting and sculpture by an international group of artists, most of them mid-career and established, with a small number of emerging names. The work comes from the United States, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Mexico, and a lot of it is tactile — laser-cut shapes stitched onto canvas in Kaori Takamura’s pieces, woven work by Bhakti Ziek, layered canvases from Udo Noger, and work by the collaborative pair Kubach & Kropp.
The roster has depth at both ends. Estate work by Fritz Scholder and the glass sculptor Howard Ben Tre sits beside living painters such as John Randall Nelson and Barbara Rogers, and Sandro Gebert, a Swiss-American artist working between printmaking, painting and street-art influences, shows here too. Shows change about monthly, which rewards a return visit more than most rooms on the street.
What to buy
A large abstract. The gallery’s core and the reason to come; the scale and surface of the work are what photographs miss.
Sculpture. Wall pieces and freestanding work from the roster, often with a material twist — glass, stone, stitched or carved surfaces.
A work from the current show. Gebert’s monthly exhibitions are focused, and the solo shows are the best chance to see an artist’s range in one room.
Something by a Santa Fe artist. The affiliated Gebert Contemporary in Santa Fe shares artists with Scottsdale, and the fall 2026 show is built around them.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery is on the north side of Main Street a few doors west of The Legacy Gallery on the Scottsdale Road corner, with T.H. Brennen Fine Art a few doors to the west. Main Street parking is short-term and usually full; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat five-minute walk east, and the Old Town on foot note maps it. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.
Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., so this is one of the galleries on the block that is dark on Sunday and Monday. Thursday’s ArtWalk is when openings happen; “High Desert/Low Desert: Works from Santa Fe” runs until October 8, 2026, and Daniel Brice’s “Silver Strand” opens that evening and runs to November 5. In March the gallery also takes a booth at Scottsdale Art Week at WestWorld, the easiest way to see its roster alongside the international trade.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is across the street at 7131 East Main and has been the gallery row’s dinner for years. The Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, the Rusty Spur Saloon pours across Scottsdale Road in a 1921 bank, and Los Olivos on Second Street has served Sonoran plates to the neighborhood since 1947.
How it got here
Main Street’s gallery trade was born Western. Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968 as the first gallery on the street, and through the 1970s and 1980s the old storefronts west of Scottsdale Road filled with bronze, landscape and cowboy painting for a winter-resident clientele. Contemporary work gathered a block north, on Marshall Way, where Wilde Meyer had opened in 1983 and the street became the district’s modern half.
Gebert Contemporary arrived on Main Street in the early 2000s — Southwest Contemporary counted twenty-four years on the street in March 2026 — and brought Marshall Way’s sensibility onto the Western row, with a program of abstraction rather than representation. Its affiliate in Santa Fe, also called Gebert Contemporary, gave it a second foot in the other capital of the Southwestern art trade and a shared pool of artists.
The 2010s were hard on contemporary galleries in Old Town. In 2014, as Lisa Sette prepared to leave Marshall Way for midtown Phoenix after 28 years, the critic behind the Explore Art Phoenix blog walked Main Street on a Thursday and wondered aloud whether its “growing hodgepodge of galleries” was the direction the scene should take; the refuge that night was Gebert, across the street from a metal-art gallery the writer had just left, where the group show “Text not texting” hung beside Fritz Scholder’s painting Purgatory and Elliott McDowell’s photograph of Scholder in profile with a buffalo. Gebert stayed when others left.
It remains, in the 2020s, the Main Street room for contemporary abstraction, showing at Scottsdale Art Week since that fair began in 2025 and keeping its monthly calendar through the ArtWalk seasons. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the Western rooms around it; Gebert is the one that shows what else the street can hold.