Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Bridging Painting, Video, and Performance

Few figures have shaped contemporary art like Mike Steiner. His legacy fuses abstract painting, videokunst, and Berlin’s avant-garde, redefining the boundaries and experience of art.

To encounter the art of Mike Steiner is to slip between worlds—a swirl of ephemeral gestures, vivid pigments, and flickers of archived moments. As a pioneer of contemporary art, Mike Steiner’s work traverses the porous borders between painting and video, performance and documentation, abstraction and political intervention. But what happens when the canvas extends into tape, and the gallery overflows into life itself?

Few names resonate as widely within the contemporary arts in Berlin as Mike Steiner. His multifaceted oeuvre—spanning abstract painting, pioneering video works, and the curation of performances—has left an indelible mark on the cultural map. Emerging in the 1960s with informally expressive canvases, Steiner’s restless artistic hunger led him to interrogate the very substance of art: first in paint, then through the lens of a camera, and finally as an architect of spaces that dissolved boundaries between artists and audiences.

Rooted in post-war Berlin, Mike Steiner began his artistic career early. At just 17, he debuted at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung, signaling a precocious engagement with the city’s avant-garde. His training at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, particularly under mentors like Hans Kuhn, sharpened both his technical skills and his critical instincts. Yet it was Steiner’s transatlantic sojourn to New York in the mid-1960s—the creative forge of artists like Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow, and Lil Picard—that stoked his affinity for the new: Fluxus, Happenings, and the slippery zone where art and life merge.

This formative period crystallized two defining threads in his work: a commitment to aesthetic experimentation and a fascination with collaborative process. It was in the New York and later Berlin milieu that Steiner absorbed from contemporaries such as Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, and Valie Export—artists who, like Steiner, would later shape the international discourse on performing and media arts.

Notably, Steiner’s Hotel Steiner, founded in 1970 near the iconic Kurfürstendamm, was more than a refuge. It became the Berlin answer to the Chelsea Hotel, a buzzing epicenter for the international avant-garde. Here, creative dialogues unfolded over long nights and dawns—impromptu performances, evolving projects, and heated debates that would propel the capital’s reputation as a node for contemporary arts. Friendships forged here, with figures such as Ben Vautier or Carolee Schneemann, became engines for new artistic forms—experimental, anarchic, and always unafraid of controversy.

By the early 1970s, Steiner’s faith in painting wavered as new media beckoned. Inspired by models like Florence’s Studio Art/Tapes/22 and the revolutionary pulse of the Berliner scene, he founded the Studiogalerie: an independent nexus for video production, performance, and multimedia installations. Crucially, it gave Berlin—unlike Cologne at the time—a crucial platform for Video Art and fluxus-inspired performance. Steiner wasn’t just an observer; he provided equipment, curated happenings, and recorded now-historic performances by Abramovi?, Ulay, Gerz, and many others.

His own artistic output during this period was groundbreaking. Alongside collaborators such as Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, Steiner produced some of the earliest German video artworks, dancing on the edge of genre. He plunged into performance documentation and even orchestrated art interventions blending risk and theatricality—like the legendary 1976 action with Ulay, in which a Spitzweg painting was "stolen” and filmed as a provocative commentary on art’s aura and institutional authority. These works—part protest, part performative installation—stand today as milestones in both video and conceptual art histories.

Steiner’s absorption with the ephemerality of live art led naturally to extensive collecting and archiving—his tapes capture a formative era of European and American Video Art, featuring legends such as Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, and Gary Hill. His collection, later bequeathed to the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, remains a priceless resource for researchers and enthusiasts eager to trace the genealogy of contemporary time-based media.

Yet Steiner’s legacy is not only archival. Recurrent solo exhibitions—most notably his grand 1999 retrospective "Color Works" at the Hamburger Bahnhof—underscore his enduring commitment to painting, even as he persistently revised its rules. The so-called "Painted Tapes" exemplify his hybrid aesthetic: video-derived abstractions, where electronic signals and brushstrokes interlace, foreshadowing today’s interest in multimedia installations. His later abstract works, richly chromatic and spatially ambiguous, continue to captivate with their atmospheric intensity and formal daring.

Unlike some of his peers, Mike Steiner deftly resisted specialization. His experimental spirit—oscillating between Super-8 film, photography, copy art, and digital montage—embodied the best of Berlin’s artistic pluralism. In this sense, his career parallels figures like Bruce Nauman, whose own border-defying oeuvre redefined what art could be, or Vito Acconci, who, like Steiner, orchestrated interventions questioning authorship and audience. Yet what distinguishes Steiner is his deep investment in community—his role as host, curator, interlocutor, archivist, and catalyst. He shaped not only artworks but artistic gatherings, leaving an infrastructure of possibility for those who followed.

Philosophically, Steiner’s career radiated an unease with easy certainties. He saw art as an unstable zone—dependent on context, collaboration, and medium but always courting risk. His own words, scattered throughout his archives, bespeak a restless search for new expressive solutions and a skepticism toward artistic dogma. Even after a debilitating stroke in 2006, Steiner continued to work in his Berlin studio, turning his energy toward fabric pieces and ever more distilled abstract paintings.

The contemporary art world today is, in many ways, an echo chamber of dialogues that Mike Steiner helped initiate. His influence resonates through the walls of the Hamburger Bahnhof, in the ongoing conversation between video, performance, and painting, and across the online platforms preserving his visual research and experiments. To explore his work is to discover both the DNA of artistic innovation in Berlin and a template for fearless, generative cross-pollination.

Mike Steiner endures—vivid, elusive, and ever current. For those seeking to understand the porous boundaries of contemporary art, a deep dive into his paintings, videotapes, and archives unlocks fresh insights into the perennial question: where, exactly, does art begin and end?

For an immersive overview and exemplary images covering the range of Mike Steiner’s contemporary art, visit the official Mike Steiner website for a comprehensive archive and artist biography