Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Between Painting, Performance, and Video Avantgarde

Mike Steiner shaped contemporary art through restless experimentation — from abstract paintings to pioneering video installations. Explore the innovative mind behind Berlin’s creative vanguard.

To encounter Mike Steiner’s contemporary art is to cross the viscosity between image, medium, and movement. What defines an artwork’s frontier—when brushstroke turns to camera flicker, and painting merges with light, noise, or human presence? Mike Steiner, whose restless journey through painting, video, and performance indelibly shaped Berlin’s avantgarde, left behind a legacy of transformation and bold innovation.

Few artists so fluently traversed the shifting tides of artistic media as Mike Steiner. In Germany’s postwar art landscape, he moved from the realms of abstract painting—exhibited at major halls like the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung—to the electric potential of video, performance art, and installation. With every phase, Steiner’s works captured something elusive: transient states, spatial tension, and the fragile intensity of live action, as seen in the corridors of Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Steiner’s first major impact arrived through painting. Having studied under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn at Berlin’s University of the Arts, his early exhibitions—on both sides of the Atlantic, from Berlin to New York—marked him as a dexterous talent among his peers, including Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Yet, even then, Steiner’s gaze wandered beyond the frame. A turning point came during his time in New York, as introduced to the world of Fluxus and experimental film by luminaries like Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow, whose radical approaches to action and processes profoundly influenced him.

It is here, at the intersection of abstract paintings and new media, that Steiner found his artistic home. His time at the legendary Hotel Steiner—a creative hotspot in West Berlin likened to the bohemian Chelsea Hotel—became formative. The Hotel, alongside his later Studiogalerie, functioned as both an intellectual furnace and a meeting place for global artists: Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, and Ulay among them, setting the scene for Berlin as a crucible of contemporary art production.

Steiner’s trajectory took a decisive shift as he stepped fully into video art. Inspired by the vibrant scene in New York and later by a residency in Florence’s Studio Art/Tapes/22, Steiner embraced the untapped possibilities of portable video. In 1974, he founded Berlin’s Studiogalerie—a pioneering hub for video and performance long before video art gained institutional recognition in Germany. Here, the lines between artist, producer, documentarian, and curator blurred: Steiner filmed, supported, and catalyzed the genre’s arrival in the German capital. He handed expensive video gear to artists, enabling a generation to experiment with moving images and ephemeral action.

His own video works, often created in close collaboration with Fluxus protagonists like Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, and performance legends such as Valie Export or Carolee Schneemann, bear testament to this era. The famed action "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" (1976), orchestrated with Ulay, transcended simple documentation to become both a provocation and an artwork itself—the removal of Spitzweg’s "Arme Poet" from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie serving as an iconoclastic intervention into the sanctity of the art object.

Steiner’s video camera was not merely an observational instrument; it was an accomplice in the realization and preservation of art that was, by its nature, fleeting. He produced and documented critical performances such as Marina Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body," fortifying the city’s reputation as a capital for action and experimental art. His own "Painted Tapes" series stands out as a bold attempt to fuse video and painting, transforming moving images into textured, color-drenched surfaces—a dialogue between abstract expression and electronic media.

Few collections have mapped the trajectory of video art in Germany as systematically as Steiner’s own Collection Mike Steiner. The archive, consisting of works by international avantgarde luminaries—Ulay, Valie Export, Nam June Paik, Richard Serra—became a critical resource for the field. The collection’s permanent home in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart further cemented Steiner’s role as both guardian and innovator of new artistic territories, notably through the 1999 solo exhibition "Color Works".

Whereas contemporaries like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola were developing monumental video installations, Steiner’s oeuvre retained an intimacy—a human presence traced in image, gesture, and environment. His influence paralleled that of Joseph Beuys in conceptual rigor, and that of Marina Abramovi? in the fusion of performance and endurance, yet with a singular Berlin imprint: the city, with its collisions of texture, politics, and underground energy, pulses through his works.

Steiner’s later years mark a return to painting, but now deeply informed by time-based media and abstraction. His canvases of the 2000s, shown in galleries like DNA Berlin and later at the GALVANO ART GALLERY Leipzig, evoke a sense of both distance and immediacy—a memory of moving images infiltrating paint, a painterly response to a world mediated by screens and fleeting moments. The improvisational spirit of performing arts lived on in each brushstroke.

Through multi-layered experiment and an intuitive drive for connection, Mike Steiner articulated a philosophy: that art is not bound by medium, nor by convention or market. Art, for Steiner, was always encounter, always process. His initiatives—the television broadcast "Videogalerie" (1985–1990), influential symposiums, and tireless advocacy for new formats—were animated by belief in accessibility and dialogue. Even his later measured withdrawal after a stroke in 2006 was marked by quiet productivity in his Berlin studio, and an unwavering commitment to creation and teaching.

Ultimately, Mike Steiner’s significance for contemporary art is that of a mediator, catalyst, and relentless advocate for the expansion of possibility. His archive and collection, although still not fully digitized, remain a beacon for future researchers and art lovers. His influence reverberates in the living, breathing scene of Contemporary Arts Berlin: in every happening, pop-up performance, and installation that challenges the viewer to look again, to question boundaries.