Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer at the Crossroads of Painting and Videokunst

Discover how Mike Steiner reshaped contemporary art through groundbreaking video works, abstract paintings, and legendary exhibitions, leaving an indelible mark on Berlin's art scene and beyond.

To encounter the work of Mike Steiner is to step into a world where contemporary art is constantly deconstructed and reborn. From the trembling line of a charcoal drawing to the flicker of a video screen, his legacy is a poem written in both paint and pixels. How does one push the boundaries between image and experience, between observation and participation? For Mike Steiner, the answer was ever in flux—restless, experimental, yet fiercely coherent in its avant-garde ambition.

From the early days of his career in the vibrant tumult of Berlin's post-war art scene, Mike Steiner was never content to stand still. Educated at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in West-Berlin, he exhibited as a youth at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung—his “Stillleben mit Krug” already hinting at the formal curiosity and latent abstraction that would define his later contemporary art practice. But it was in the radical atmosphere of the 1960s and early 70s—fueled by studies, travels to New York, and encounters with figures like Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Al Hansen—that Steiner evolved into a true agent of artistic change.

Immersing himself in the heart of the Fluxus and Happening movements, Mike Steiner first made his mark as a painter, with works spanning Informal and Pop-Art styles, breezily referencing and rebutting the visual strategies of contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Yet it was video—then a nascent, little-valued medium—that truly unlocked his relentless curiosity. By the early 1970s, painting alone seemed insufficient: video permitted not just representation, but time, narrative, and action.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary thrust of contemporary arts in Berlin, Steiner's legendary "Hotel Steiner" and the "Studiogalerie" soon became crucibles for new artistic forms. Here, visiting artists—including titans like Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Carolee Schneemann, and Ben Vautier—found not just hospitality but fertile territory for performance, conceptual experiments, and, of course, video art. International parallels inevitably draw connections with Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, reinforcing Steiner's canonical status in the global video art pantheon.

The gallery was more than a space: it was a living archive, a site where action met documentation. Especially notable was the infamous 1976 “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst” with Ulay—a performative ‘art theft’ of Spitzweg’s “Der arme Poet” from Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. Steiner did not merely orchestrate happenings; he also operated the video camera, ensuring transient performance was captured for posterity—a theme paralleling the work of Marina Abramovi?, whose “Freeing the Body” was also preserved by Steiner’s lens, and whose dialogue with notions of ephemerality and endurance resonates within Steiner’s oeuvre.

Steiner's legacy is thus multifaceted: artist, curator, archivist, and catalyst. His Video Gallery (1985–1990) pushed the boundaries of public art mediation in Germany, broadcasting more than 120 TV episodes centered on video art—decades before digital democratization made contemporary art accessible to wider audiences.

The influence of Mike Steiner is perhaps most tangible through his curation and expansion of a ground-breaking video collection, now held at the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. This repository includes irreplaceable documentation of works by Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, and Richard Serra, forming a living DNA of late-20th-century Performance and Video Art. Steiner’s own contributions—his “Painted Tapes”, for example—epitomize the intricate dialogue between painterly surface and electronic image, inviting comparison to the cross-media experiments of Gary Hill or the early digital interventions of Bruce Nauman.

Yet Steiner’s career is not merely an ode to technological innovation. Even as he delved deep into video, he never lost sight of the tactile, manual pleasures of painting. By 2000 and after a life-altering stroke, Mike Steiner gravitated back to abstract painting, creating large-format color fields and exploring series that married texture, spontaneity, and formal rigor. In exhibitions such as the acclaimed 1999 solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof—one of the most prestigious showcases for contemporary arts in Berlin—his “Color Works” united decades of painterly wisdom with the ever-present pulse of experimental energy. Works from his late period are marked by a luminous, almost meditative, palette, reflecting a mature engagement with color, surface, and abstraction—a vision as emotionally direct as any performance piece.

The international relevance of Steiner’s oeuvre is equally amplified by his stewardship and staging of important solo and group exhibitions, ranging from the experimental art halls of Berlin in the 1960s, to iconic stops in Florence, Paris, New York and beyond. Artists like Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramovi?, and Bill Viola—each a protagonist of their own contemporary art revolution—crossed paths with Steiner, drawn by the visionary scope and radical hospitality of his professional undertakings.

Behind the scenes, Steiner’s biography—shaped by war, exile, artistic risk, and global curiosity—lends his work a sense of urgency and grace. Having witnessed historical shifts from prewar East Prussia to Cold War Berlin, Steiner transformed personal upheaval into creative action. His restless drive for experimentation—whether in painting, performance, photography, or curatorship—echoes the broader arc of 20th-century avant-garde, locating him squarely among artists who not only produced, but shaped, the contemporary art dialogue.

What, then, makes Mike Steiner’s vision enduringly relevant? The answer lies in his synthesis of the tactile and the ephemeral—his insistence that art must breathe, move, and sometimes disappear. His archive, both physical and conceptual, serves as a nexus of Berlin video art, contemporary arts Berlin, and a testament to the city’s enduring spirit of reinvention.

If you seek inspiration on how contemporary art can move beyond the canvas, how the boundaries of painting, installation, and time-based media become provocatively blurred, a closer look at Mike Steiner’s life-work is imperative. Explore his official website at Mike Steiner – contemporary art, biography, and archive for in-depth essays, biographic details, and a gallery of his work—each composition a door to a new dimension of experience.

Mike Steiner’s impact—like a signal pulsing across time—remains etched into the fabric of contemporary art. His legacy invites viewers to not simply look, but to participate and remember: every contemporary art encounter can be both performance and memory, image and action, color and light.