Mike Steiner and the Boundaries of Contemporary Art: From Abstract Painting to Video Avantgarde
24.12.2025 - 13:28:03
What happens when an artist refuses to choose between color and camera, material and event? Mike Steiner, a seminal figure of contemporary art in Germany, embodies this restlessness. Known today as both a painter and a video art trailblazer, Steiner’s practice opens questions about the very nature of contemporary arts in Berlin and beyond.
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His biography reads like a survey of postwar European modernism and its transformation in the context of Berlin's cultural ferment. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, Mike Steiner gravitated toward film during his school years but soon found his way to abstract painting. At just seventeen, he exhibited at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, marking an early entry into the art world's public eye. The atmosphere in postwar Berlin, buzzing with the energies of the Kreuzberger Bohème and self-managed galleries, gave Steiner his first stage and introduced him to the dynamic intersections of painting, performance, and new media.
By the early 1960s, Steiner's developing interest in informal and abstract painting brought him to prominence among other contemporary German painters, often sharing walls with figures like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. But even during his formal training at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, the seeds of doubt about painting as an ultimate medium were sown. His sojourn in New York in the mid-1960s, where he lived among the likes of Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and occasionally crossed paths with Robert Motherwell and Allan Kaprow, exposed him to Fluxus, Pop Art, and the nascent culture of happenings. These transatlantic influences catalyzed his later genre-defying pursuits—including eventual turn towards video art.
After returning to Berlin, Steiner’s foundational acts as artist, curator, and catalyst began with the creation of the legendary Hotel Steiner in 1970, a veritable Berliner counterpart to New York's Chelsea Hotel. The space thrived as a magnet for international artists—Joseph Beuys and Valie Export among them—becoming the locus of spirited art debates, late-night symposia, and a platform for the exchange and performance of ideas. Here, the boundaries between living, performing, and making art all but dissolved.
By 1974, increasing doubts about the expressive sufficiency of painting fuelled his movement into video and performance art. Inspired by the experimental studios he encountered in Florence and New York, Steiner inaugurated the Studiogalerie in Berlin’s Ludwigkirchstraße. The gallery became a crucible for artistic innovation: not only producing new video works but also hosting performances and facilitating action-based practices. In this way, Steiner was an early adopter in Germany of the radical ethos of artists such as Allan Kaprow, Ben Vautier, and Nam June Paik, contemporaries whose names are now synonymous with performance, Fluxus, and new media. A similar spirit would later define prominent Berlin-based institutions such as Hamburger Bahnhof and underpin the city’s ongoing reputation as a global center for the contemporary arts.
What makes Steiner’s contribution unique is the way he continually shifted format and purpose. He was both archivist and originator, collecting—and producing—seminal recordings by and of key performance artists: Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Carolee Schneemann, Jochen Gerz, and Valie Export, to mention just a few. The now-historic 1976 event, 'Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,' in collaboration with Ulay, involved the semi-legal removal of Spitzweg’s 'Der arme Poet' from the Neue Nationalgalerie, an act meticulously planned and executed, blurring the line between crime, protest, and happening. Steiner not only devised the event but documented it, thus capturing for posterity a performance that questioned the safety, ownership, and sacrosanctity of art itself.
The Studiogalerie operated at the junction of the ephemeral and the archival—a space where events were both staged and preserved. Inspired by similar projects in Cologne by Wulf Herzogenrath or Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, Steiner’s Berlin initiatives provided a platform for a generation of artists and audiences yet unfamiliar with the possibilities of video as art. His later television endeavor, 'Die Videogalerie' (1985–1990), produced and presented over 120 broadcasts dedicated to the emerging language of video, previewing the later multimedia strategies seen across performing arts and installations worldwide.
Yet Steiner never truly abandoned painting. His return to abstract painting in the 2000s demonstrated his restless need to explore form and color—this time enriched by decades of intermedia experience. The award-winning video paintings or 'Painted Tapes' from the 1980s, produced during and after his collaboration with Tangerine Dream, exemplify this urge to merge disciplines where video becomes a moving painting and painting aspires to the condition of film.
The significance of Mike Steiner’s oeuvre is perhaps best recognized in its institutional embrace. The 1999 retrospective 'COLOR WORKS' at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, remains a milestone, a rare celebration of an artist whose cross-disciplinary logic anticipates today’s immersive installations. His vast archive of video art, bequeathed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, is a vital repository of conceptual and media-based practices. Works from this collection have reappeared in major international shows, including the landmark 'Live to Tape' exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof 2011/12—a reminder of how contemporary art continues to be shaped by the radical questioning of earlier decades.
For those intimate with Berlin’s artistic evolution, Mike Steiner’s work is a key to understanding the city’s transformation into the capital of contemporary and performing arts. His activities as an artist, archiver, and instigator have paved the way for a younger generation who, like him, cross genres and test the limits of the possible—think of later contemporaries such as Bill Viola, Gary Hill, or even the post-Internet artists whose works fill today’s galleries. Steiner’s vision, both democratic and iconoclastic, situates him squarely within the central current of global avantgarde, even as his biography remains rooted in Berlin’s idiosyncratic energy.
Above all, what fascinates about Mike Steiner is his refusal to rest in any one medium or style. His life and art remain, for connoisseurs and newcomers alike, a master class in the restless pursuit of the new—whether in abstract paintings, pioneering video documents, or as the curator of experimental spaces that redefined what art in Berlin could be.
To immerse yourself in the full scope of Mike Steiner's legacy—from rare video art and abstract painting to performance documentation—visit the official Mike Steiner website for deeper insights and visuals.
