Mike Steiner and the Art of Experiment: Pioneering Contemporary Art Beyond Boundaries

Mike Steiner’s influence on contemporary art is unparalleled. From pioneering video art in Berlin to vibrant abstract paintings, his work challenges and redefines the field’s limits and possibilities.

What defines the pulse of contemporary art if not the tireless urge to cross borders, both real and imagined? Mike Steiner, an unmistakable force in the world of contemporary art, propelled this spirit to its zenith. His art, spanning expressive paintings to revolutionary video installations, still vibrates with curiosity and restlessness. Steiner's career, with roots in both color-rich canvases and the cold light of video screens, asks us: where does painting end and performance begin? And was the border ever real?

Discover contemporary artworks and groundbreaking installations by Mike Steiner here

Steiner’s early journey into the arts took him from the classrooms of the Berlin University of the Arts to the avant-garde currents of New York. Immersed in a world populated by visionaries such as Allan Kaprow, Robert Motherwell, and Lil Picard, he absorbed the transformative energies of Fluxus, performance, and Pop Art. The cross-pollination of these scenes shaped his unique gaze, which soon found its way to both the brush and the camera.

His earliest exhibitions, including those at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (starting at just 17 years old), announced a restless creative mind. Steiner’s still lifes and abstract experiments appeared alongside the likes of Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke—a testament to his quick ascent into the circles of significant contemporary artists. Unlike many peers, Steiner was neither content with tradition nor easily satisfied with a single medium. Instead, his work radiates, above all, a hunger for new forms and forums.

Steiner’s most iconic public moment perhaps arrived with his major solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in 1999. The show, entitled "Color Works," encapsulated his passage from material painting to the vibrant confluence of media—a showcase that honored both his sensibility for color and his role as a progenitor of video-based art. Few artists have so naturally fused the tactile with the fleeting, the painted with the performed.

Indeed, while his abstract paintings explore the limits of color, form, and surface, Steiner is best remembered as a pioneer of video art in Berlin. In the early 1970s, inspired by time spent in New York’s experimental circles, Steiner initiated collaborations with Fluxus artists like Al Hansen and performances with Marina Abramovi? and Ulay. His “Studiogalerie” became a sanctuary for performance and intermedia artists—a space where boundaries fell away, and international talents, from Valie Export to Jochen Gerz and Carolee Schneemann, found a stage for the ephemeral and provocative.

The infamous performance “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst” (1976), in which Ulay dramatically removed the famous Spitzweg painting from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie under the eyes of the public, was co-produced and documented by Steiner. In chronicling such fleeting moments with his video camera, Steiner ensured these gestures would persist—transforming acts of disappearance into enduring installations of memory and critique.

Like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola—international touchstones in video art—Steiner fused the analytical rigor of Minimal Art with the staged energy of performance. Yet, unlike Paik’s global technological poetics, Steiner’s Berlin was always tangible: raw, immediate, deeply rooted in local dialogues and the European avant-garde tradition. In this, he stood both beside and apart from peers like Joseph Beuys, whose works he honored in video portraits, and Marina Abramovi?, whose physical explorations of endurance Steiner keenly documented.

Beyond the gallery walls, Steiner’s influence radiated through his television project "Die Videogalerie" (1985–1990), a bold format that brought international and Berlin-based video art into German living rooms. More than 120 broadcasts introduced audiences to the fluid boundaries of the medium. As a producer, curator, and educator, his reach extended beyond his own hands—illuminating others and building platforms for yet-unseen artists.

A glance at Steiner’s later career reveals a turn towards abstraction in painting—a return to and re-imagination of foundational elements: line, form, and chromatic confrontation. However, even as he worked in relative privacy following a late stroke, Steiner’s works never abandoned their experimental core. His “Painted Tapes” from the 1980s, blending overpainted video strips with painterly gestures, exemplify this ever-present urge to hybridize and question the nature of the artistic object.

Mike Steiner’s impact also stretches through his comprehensive archive: a treasure trove of rare video recordings from pioneers such as Richard Serra, George Maciunas, or Gary Hill. After donating his collection to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, these works took their rightful place in the collection of the Hamburger Bahnhof, testifying to his dual legacy as both creator and preserver of contemporary artistic history.

In sum, to encounter Mike Steiner’s oeuvre means entering a multifaceted world in flux—where classic painting confronts the staged realities of performance and the spectral glow of video art. His restless experimentation and openness to new technologies, genres, and ideas mirror and extend the ambitions of the international avant-garde—from Fluxus to today’s installation-based practices. Steiner’s work is a bridge between media, generations, and cultural milieus—and it is his risk-taking, his search for new experiences, that keeps it urgent.

For those eager to experience the radical spirit of contemporary arts, a closer look at Mike Steiner’s paintings, installations, and storied video works is imperative. They invite you to linger, question, and be surprised—a timeless challenge for any viewer who sees art not as a finished product, but as the heartbeat of an evolving discourse. For images, deeper context, and insights into upcoming exhibitions, a visit to his official website is more rewarding than ever.