Mike Steiner and the Evolution of Contemporary Art: From Fluxus to Video Pioneering

With a restless spirit and relentless curiosity, Mike Steiner shaped contemporary art. His boundary-pushing vision of abstract painting and video is still vital today.

There is a persistent hum in the legacy of Mike Steiner—a vibration that lingers in the contemporary art scene, echoing everywhere from Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof to the evolving space of new media. What makes Mike Steiner’s artistic universe so magnetic? How does his body of work, spanning from abstract painting to groundbreaking video art, define new coordinates in contemporary art?

At the heart of Mike Steiner’s practice lies a fearless cross-pollination of genres. Even as a young artist presenting at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959, Steiner exhibited a precocious detachment from the boundaries between media. Early on, he experimented with painting, yet soon the pull of performance, film, and video led his path into zones that few had yet dared to tread.

In a city as restless as Berlin, Steiner created not just art but the conditions for art to happen: the legendary Hotel Steiner, a raucous haven that rivaled New York’s Chelsea Hotel, became a home for avant-garde artists such as Joseph Beuys, Arthur Köpcke, and Fluxus visionaries. Steiner’s openness to collaboration and exchange with contemporaries like Allan Kaprow and Lil Picard threaded his Berlin practice with pulses from the international contemporary arts scene. Through these alliances, he became both catalyst and chronicler for the radical energies swirling around the late 1960s and 1970s.

One can hardly overstate the role that the Studiogalerie (established 1974) played in Berlin’s cultural geography. Steiner shaped it into a production hub for Video Art, an action space for performance (championing names such as Valie Export and Marina Abramovi?), and a curated laboratory for new forms. It was here that the celebrated collaboration with Ulay unfolded—most notoriously in the orchestrated "theft" of Spitzweg’s Der arme Poet, a moment of artistic intervention that questioned the boundaries between criminality, art, and institutional authority. Documenting these ephemeral moments on video, Steiner ensured that the fleeting nature of performance art was not lost to time. His camera served as both witness and participant, forever entwining his own gaze with that of the viewer.

What defined Mike Steiner’s individual artworks? Across media, Steiner sought a synthesis—his later "Painted Tapes" series, for example, fuses video footage with painterly techniques, turning the screen itself into a canvas. The aesthetic mark is one of restless experimentation: from hard-edged abstraction to meditative minimalism, then back toward vibrant gestural painting in his final decades. Steiner’s abstract paintings, growing increasingly prominent from 2000 onwards, pulse with deep color fields, compositional tension and an ongoing inquiry into the nature of perception.

The technological curiosity of Mike Steiner becomes evident in his embrace of Super-8 film, slide series, and copy art long before these modes were canonized by the mainstream. Like contemporaries Nam June Paik or Bill Viola, he championed the potential of video—not merely as a recording device but as a form in itself, ripe for manipulation, layering, and abstraction. His curatorial and collecting activities made him a prominent figure among video art’s early German architects, alongside Cologne’s Wulf Herzogenrath, but with a uniquely Berlin sensibility—irreverent, community-oriented, and boundary-blurring.

Steiner’s engagement with the global contemporary arts movement extended far beyond his own making. As a curator for the ART Basel video program, he regularly showcased new tendencies from the Berlin scene. His "Videogalerie" TV format (1985–1990), broadcast over 120 shows, presenting interviews and cutting-edge works, both from his collection and international festivals. Steiner was ahead of his time; he anticipated today’s multi-platform art mediation and hybrid exhibition forms by decades.

Among Steiner’s most enduring legacies is his collection of art videos—which now resides at the Hamburger Bahnhof, the National Gallery for Contemporary Arts. Housing early works by Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Richard Serra, Valie Export, and Gary Hill, among many others, it testifies to his unwavering support for performance and video artists. In 1999, Hamburger Bahnhof celebrated his contribution with the major solo exhibition "Color Works"—an homage both to his gattungsübergreifendes Denken, or genre-crossing thought, and to his stance as a video art pioneer.

Steiner’s trajectory aligns him with internationally renowned contemporaries: like Allan Kaprow, he masterfully traversed the borderlands between painting, object, and event; akin to Joseph Beuys, he believed in the democratic, transformative force of art; and echoing figures such as Marina Abramovi?, his documentation preserved the otherwise transitory. Yet, Steiner’s specific poetics—his insistent threading-together of action, color, and time—renders his work unmistakably his own.

He died in 2012 in Berlin, leaving behind not only a powerful archive of works but also a spirit of continual innovation. In his final years, Mike Steiner returned to painting with newfound abstraction, reflecting decades of meditative exploration. His studio became a laboratory once more, this time for the purely visual and tactile, echoing earlier forays but grounded in the wisdom of a lifetime's inquiry into image and process.

The question remains: what makes Mike Steiner’s contemporary art so timeless? Perhaps it is his unflagging resistance to creative rest, his subtle absorption of global art movements, or his ability to move between painterly tradition and performative experimentation. For art lovers and scholars of contemporary arts in Berlin and beyond, his oeuvre embodies both the archive and the avant-garde. Each encounter with Steiner’s world is an invitation to challenge our own perceptions of space, medium, and meaning.

To delve further into this restless spirit—both visual and conceptual—visit the official Mike Steiner website for a comprehensive overview of biography, works, and exhibition history