Mike Steiner: Pioneering Contemporary Art from Abstract Painting to Video Revolution

Mike Steiner transformed contemporary art by bridging abstract painting, video art, and performance. Discover how his restless curiosity made him a central figure in Berlin’s avant-garde scene.

The contemporary art world owes much to visionaries who transgress boundaries between media and tradition. Mike Steiner, whose name echoes in the corridors of German postwar art, stands as a restless innovator—one who reshaped the possibilities of artistic expression in painting, video, and performance. His story is inseparable from the pulse of Contemporary Arts Berlin, from the Kreuzberger Bohème of the 1960s to the shining galleries of Hamburger Bahnhof.

What happens when an artist challenges the status quo of painting, only to embrace the moving image as canvas, and then returns to abstraction with new vigour? Mike Steiner’s practice asks us to question where painting ends and the performative begins—a journey that has left deep traces on the map of European art.

From his earliest exposure to art—first in the tumultuous Berlin of his youth, then through New York’s experimental spirit—Steiner’s career evolved in pulses of radical shifts. Already at 17, he made his debut at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung with poised oil paintings. But the rapid succession of exhibitions in the early 1960s betrayed a more feverish drive: Steiner was searching for more than aesthetic pleasure; he sought an artform alive to the world’s volatility.

His formative years included immersion in the Kreuzberger Forum’s burgeoning art scene, yet ambition soon drew him across the Atlantic. The Ford Foundation fellowship to the United States placed him at the threshold of New York’s explosive hybrid of Pop Art, Happening, and Fluxus. Encounters with names like Allan Kaprow, Lil Picard, and Robert Motherwell offered not only inspiration but validation of a growing artistic restlessness. Here, the seeds were sown for his lifelong openness to new materials, formats, and communities of artists.

Back in Berlin by the late 1960s, Mike Steiner’s own artistic language was in flux. His work stood alongside those of Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke—a testimony to his stature in German painting. Yet by the 1970s, he began to doubt the sufficiency of painting. A fascination with the avant-garde film and new media, sparked in part by friendships with key figures of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, pulled him in unexpected directions.

This doubt fueled innovation. In 1970, Steiner opened the now-legendary Hotel Steiner. Not merely a physical space, the hotel became a living laboratory for artistic conversation, reminiscent of New York’s Chelsea Hotel or Zürich’s Café Voltaire. Artists such as Joseph Beuys and Arthur Köpcke passed through, while the hotel’s very atmosphere—described once as a “Home far away from Home”—seeped into creative acts staged within its walls.

By 1974, inspired by the pioneering Studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Steiner founded the Studiogalerie in Berlin—an independent forum devoted to video art and performance. It was here that he provided artists unprecedented access to video technology, and staged actions with the likes of Marina Abramovi?, VALIE EXPORT, Ulay, and Carolee Schneemann. The Studiogalerie grew into a unique crucible where the performing arts intermingled with video and installations, offering the Berlin scene a rare European site for the confluence of emerging art forms.

Among his most iconic contributions is the collaboration with Ulay for the infamous 1976 performance "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst", in which they orchestrated a staged theft of Spitzweg’s famous painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie. This action—documented meticulously on video—became legend, encapsulating Steiner’s role as both producer and chronicler of boundary-breaking art.

Notably, his own Painted Tapes from the early 1980s manifested the fusion of video and abstract painting: moving images intertwined with painterly gestures, each medium subverting and enriching the other. These works stand as forerunners to the intermedia explorations of later artists like Bill Viola or Gary Hill, who, like Steiner, interrogated the relationship between time, technology, and human perception. A parallel may be drawn to Nam June Paik’s meditative video installations, or even to the process-driven painting techniques of Sigmar Polke—but always retaining a distinctly Steinerian spirit of flux and experiment.

The 1980s also saw Mike Steiner establishing the television format Videogalerie, bringing avant-garde video art directly into Berlin’s living rooms. For five years, Steiner not only produced but presented over a hundred episodes, foregrounding both his own collection and interviews with international artists. His initiative mirrored—and perhaps extended—the earlier innovations of Gerry Schum, underlining Steiner’s particular knack for mediation between artist and audience.

The importance of the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart as a platform for Mike Steiner’s legacy cannot be overstated. The major retrospective “Color Works” in 1999 spotlighted not only his pioneering abstract paintings of the late 1990s but also recognized his enduring role in shaping the contemporary art of Berlin. His videotape collection, bequeathed to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, remains one of the most significant archives of European video and performance art, featuring rare documentation from Ulay, Abramovi?, Jochen Gerz, Richard Serra, and more.

Over the decades, Mike Steiner’s oeuvre wandered through multiple media—Super 8 film, photography, copy art, minimalism—always anchored in a belief in art as living experiment. Even after a stroke in 2006, Steiner continued his investigations in painting until his death in 2012. His last works—purely abstract, sometimes venturing into textile—echo the restless curiosity that defined his career.

What, then, is Mike Steiner’s place in the canon of contemporary art? Perhaps it is his commitment to process, to risk, to the opening of new platforms for artists with revolutionary intent. In this, he shares conceptual kinship with Christian Boltanski’s devotion to memory, or the dialectical tensions in the installations of Bruce Nauman. Yet his Berlin remains unique: a city made vivid by Steiner's vision, at once archive and performance space, bridge between painting and video, permanence and fleeting action.

For art lovers and scholars alike, Mike Steiner remains an essential figure—one inviting us to embrace the fullness of contemporary art across all its forms. To appreciate his achievements is to rediscover the electric promise of the new, again and again.