What it’s actually like
Main Street’s galleries mostly sell recognizable things — horses, mesas, Navajo women, Tuscan villages. Klingeler Gallery, at 7117 East Main, sells color and gesture. It is the street’s abstract room, showing abstract paintings by Christian Klingeler, and it reads more like a contemporary studio than a traditional Main Street gallery: a curated collection on the walls, and a design practice behind them that will make a painting for a specific room.
The artist’s story is not the usual one. Klingeler is a disabled Marine Corps veteran who found in painting a way to manage anxiety and PTSD. He was born in Michigan, grew up in Los Angeles and studied art in Seattle, where he started oil painting while working in law enforcement; he went on to become one of the first federal air marshals hired after 9/11, then moved to Phoenix and earned a master’s degree in psychology. Music, he says, drives the energy he puts into a canvas. A portion of every sale goes to PTSD and anxiety research.
The other half of the business is commissions. The gallery’s designer, with more than a decade of experience, builds proposals with AutoCAD elevations of the art on your wall and custom color-palette guides keyed to your interior, and there are dedicated services for interior designers and the trade. For anyone furnishing a house, that is the practical draw.
What to buy
An abstract from the walls. The gallery’s curated collection is the place to judge Klingeler’s color and texture in person before deciding whether to commission.
A commission. The signature service: a piece designed around your room, with a drawn elevation and palette signed off before the paint goes on.
A piece for the office or a client. The trade and interior-design programs exist for designers placing work in homes, offices and hospitality spaces.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery is mid-block on Main Street between Marshall Way and Scottsdale Road, across from the R.C. Gorman Navajo Gallery and a door or two from Sissoko Tribal Art Gallery. Main Street’s curb spaces are 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.
The gallery does not publish fixed hours on its website, so call or email before a special trip, especially in summer. Thursday evening’s ArtWalk is when the street is liveliest and the best time to see the work alongside the district’s Western rooms. For a commission, make an appointment and bring room photos, dimensions and a sense of your palette; the proposal process is designed around them.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro at 7131 East Main is a few doors east and has fed the gallery row since 1987. The Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, pink since 1958, and Růže Cake House at the west end of the block does coffee and cake. The Rusty Spur Saloon across Scottsdale Road is the end-of-night drink.
How it got here
Main Street became Scottsdale’s gallery row in the 1970s, and for most of the half-century since, its identity has been Western and traditional — bronzes, landscapes, Native American art — while contemporary and abstract work gravitated to Marshall Way a block north. The 7100 block reflects that history, with Native art rooms like Territorial Indian Arts at one end and long-running painting galleries along the middle.
In the 2020s the block began to turn over and diversify. In August 2022 the California painter Erin Hanson, known for the thick, unblended brushwork she calls “Open Impressionism,” opened the Erin Hanson Gallery at 7117 East Main, devoted largely to her desert and Southwest landscapes and joining her galleries in McMinnville, Oregon and Carmel-by-the-Sea. It was a single-artist room run on the strength of a national following.
Klingeler Gallery took over the same space, keeping the single-artist model but swapping the landscape for abstraction. By March 2026 it was listed at 7117 in the Scottsdale Arts District’s printed gallery guide, one of several newer rooms — Sissoko Tribal Art Gallery next door among them — that have broadened what Main Street sells. A Marine veteran’s abstract canvases, sold with a donation to PTSD research and a commission service built for interior designers, is a long way from the cowboy bronzes that built the street, and that is the point.