Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Between Painting, Performance, and Pioneering Video
06.01.2026 - 13:28:01
How far can the boundary between static painting and the moving image be stretched? In the realm of contemporary art, few have explored this space with such restless intensity and intellectual ambition as Mike Steiner. His career, emerging in postwar Berlin and blossoming internationally, offers a rare insight into the restless experimentation and pioneering spirit that have come to define the best of contemporary art.
Explore contemporary artworks by Mike Steiner and discover his unique fusion of video and painting
The artistic journey of Mike Steiner is a journey through mediums, movements, and the very heart of Berlin’s avant-garde. From the poised stillness of his early paintings exhibited at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung as a teenager to the flickering, cerebral world of his art tapes, Steiner’s practice continually subverted convention. He was both participant and chronicler—a painter with a camera, a gallerist with an eye for disruption, and, at his core, a restless innovator among the context of the contemporary arts in Berlin.
Steiner’s early years foreshadow his diverse trajectory. Born in Allenstein in 1941 and raised mainly in West Berlin, he initially gravitated towards film before embracing painting. By seventeen, he was already on show with works like “Stillleben mit Krug,” his youthful brush fusing traditional forms with the stirrings of abstraction and Pop Art influences. This willingness to absorb and contest emerging visual languages would become his lifelong hallmark.
His studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn placed him at the heart of postwar German art. Encounters with Alfred Hrdlicka and the Berlin bohemia, as well as early exposure to American culture via a Ford Foundation grant, directly linked Steiner with the likes of Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and, significantly, the growing international Fluxus movement. These Berlin and New York years formed the crucible of his engagement with performance, collaborative practice, and the dissolution of artistic hierarchies—echoing something of the provocations of Joseph Beuys, with whom he exchanged lifelong respect and dialogue.
Yet it was the opening of his legendary Hotel Steiner in 1970, off the Kurfürstendamm, that established him as a key catalyst for contemporary arts in Berlin. This gathering place became a crucible for young artists and icons alike—comparable in spirit to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, immortalised by Andy Warhol’s films. The walls echoed with debate from figures like Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke, and hosted American émigrés in a city on the cultural front line. It is here, amid intense cross-pollination, that Steiner’s move towards video and performance finds its home.
Turning to video in the early 1970s, first with Fluxus artist Al Hansen and under the influence of Kaprow, Steiner travelled to Florence to work in the famed Art/Tapes/22 studio, deepening his exploration of the medium’s potential. Realising that these moving images offered tools beyond the flat canvas, he founded the Studiogalerie in Berlin’s Ludwigkirchstraße as both production hub and exhibition platform—Berlin’s answer to the Cologne video scene fostered by Wulf Herzogenrath. Here, the overlap of performance and recording formed a new visual language, capturing the actions of Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Ulay, and more.
Perhaps nowhere is this blend of artistic roles clearer than in Steiner’s documentation of Ulay’s legendary 1976 performance, in which Carl Spitzweg’s “Der arme Poet” was appropriated from the Neue Nationalgalerie and relocated to a Kreuzberg living room—art, theft, protest, and video converging in an epoch-defining moment. Steiner’s camera fixed the ephemeral, transforming fleeting gesture into enduring art history. His work here aligns him with performance-art luminaries like Marina Abramovi? and Jochen Gerz, serving both as witness and creative force.
View Mike Steiner’s exhibitions and video works at the official websiteMike Steiner – Contemporary Art Archive and Retrospective
Over the decades, Steiner never relinquished painting; rather, he wove it into his evolving video practice. His “Painted Tapes” series epitomises this interdisciplinary approach, wherein analog mark-making meets the rhythm of video, foreshadowing what today might be called media installation. In these works, the pulse of abstract painting—blocks of saturated colour, flashes of form—dissolves into electronic signal, creating an interplay reminiscent of contemporaries such as Bill Viola and Nam June Paik, though always with Steiner’s distinct touch for the poetic and personal.
Steiner’s presence in international exhibitions—culminating in the much-lauded 1999 “Color Works” solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart—testifies to his pluralistic practice. This exhibition, and the 2011 “Live to Tape”, confirmed his legacy not just as an artist, but as an archivist whose extensive video collection (now held in the Hamburger Bahnhof’s collection) provides a vital record of European and American avant-garde performance. His commitment to documentation echoes the methodologies of contemporaries like Bruce Nauman and Gary Hill, situating Steiner in the global story of multimedia and time-based art.
After a major stroke in 2006, Steiner continued to paint, now increasingly with a focus on pure abstraction. These late works, marked by layered washes and subtle geometries, speak of a return to origins. They gesture towards the quiet meditations of Mark Rothko or the muscular colorism of Georg Baselitz, yet remain unmistakably Steiner: invested in process, receptive to accident, endlessly seeking the new in the familiar.
As his archive and collection demonstrate, Mike Steiner was not only an innovator but a facilitator—a builder of platforms and a collector of transformative moments. The Berlin video and performance scene owes much to his vision. His work stands in dialogue not only with major currents of the late 20th century—Fluxus, Minimal Art, Conceptualism—but also with those searching today for new strategies in contemporary art: a testament to the power of networks, archives, and creative risk-taking.
Fascinating, finally, is the emotional resonance still found in his oeuvre. From the intellectual charge of his early Pop-infused canvases to the contemplative depth of his late abstracts, Steiner’s art insists that the act of creation is always a negotiation between memory and innovation. This is what makes his art persistently relevant—and what makes any encounter with his complex, uncompromising work so rewarding.
For further exploration into Mike Steiner’s performances, painted tapes, and profound impact on the field, the official site remains the definitive resource. The invitation is clear: dive into the archives, engage with the images, and discover anew the oscillation between media, gesture, and the possibilities of contemporary art in Berlin and beyond.
