Mike Steiner: Shaping Contemporary Art Across Painting and Video in Berlin

Mike Steiner stands as a restless innovator in contemporary art, bridging painting and video, and shaping Berlin’s vibrant creative pulse with works that echo through major exhibitions like the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Mike Steiner’s name resonates like a pulse in the corridors of contemporary art. His oeuvre, spanning from evocative painting to trailblazing video art, marks him as a restless innovator—continuously testing the elasticity of artistic media. What happens when painting rebels and the moving image becomes painterly? Steiner pursued this leading question as few others, provoking, disturbing and inspiring the Berlin art scene across decades.

It is impossible to separate Mike Steiner’s artistic practice from the vibrant experimental subcultures of Berlin. In his early days, Steiner, born in 1941 in Allenstein and later based in Berlin, quickly drew attention for both his talent and his search for new means of expression. His debut at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung at just 17, and formative studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, set a foundation of rigorous curiosity. Steiner moved between the established traditions of painting and the pulsing, cross-pollinating energies of the 1960s—immersing in both German and American avant-garde circles, brushing shoulders with figures like Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, and Lil Picard.

Berlin in the late twentieth century was a crucible of experimentation. For Steiner, it meant opening spaces: Hotel Steiner became a mythic artists’ hub compared to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, and his Studiogalerie provided vital ground for emerging practices like Fluxus, performance and, most pivotally, video art. Mike Steiner was among the first in Germany to seize video’s potential, not only as a collector but as a creator, innovator and champion. His collaborations with Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, VALIE EXPORT, Ben Vautier, and other luminaries of the international avant-garde are legendary, echoing the radical spirit of performance art while capturing its fleeting energy on tape.

The 1976 project “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” created with Ulay, remains an iconic episode in the annals of performance and video art, blurring lines between artistic intervention and criminal act, and forever shaping the city’s artistic mythology. By both orchestrating and documenting these works, Steiner anticipated the multimedia practices that have come to define contemporary arts in Berlin and beyond.

Steiner’s trajectory is one of constant evolution. After mastering informel painting and exhibiting alongside Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke in Paris, Geneva and Milan, he encountered the self-questioning crisis of painting—ultimately channeling his energies into expanded visual languages. In 1974, participation at Studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence catalyzed a paradigmatic shift toward video, prompting the founding of his own Studiogalerie in Berlin. Here, artists could access equipment, experiment, and show new work, carving space within a city otherwise lacking support for such fledgling forms.

Steiner’s work defies easy categorization. His so-called Painted Tapes blur the boundaries between traditional painting and electronic media—a gesture that resonates with similar transgressions by Nam June Paik or Bill Viola. Yet Steiner remained fiercely individual in his approach, often manipulating color, rhythm and abstraction to pull the viewer into a space of heightened consciousness. Whether working in Super-8, photocollage, or video, his approach was always marked by risk, wit, and a palpable curiosity for the interplay between image, medium, and memory.

Steiner’s significance is perhaps best encapsulated in his epic 1999 solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: "COLOR WORKS." Here, monumentally scaled paintings and groundbreaking video installations stood side by side, inviting visitors to rethink not only the hierarchies of artistic genre but their own perceptual habits. This exhibition underlined his dual legacy—both as a pioneer of contemporary painting and as a foundational figure in the early history of European video art. His works exist in dialogue with a panoply of contemporaries: one thinks of Gerhard Richter’s painterly experiments, Bruce Nauman’s pioneering videos, or Gary Hill’s visual poetics. Yet, Steiner’s path remains unmistakably distinct, forged in response to the pulse of Berlin and the crosswinds of global art trends, but always with a singular voice.

As a collector and archivist, Steiner’s foresight has proven invaluable. The Mike Steiner video collection, now entrusted to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and located in the Hamburger Bahnhof, is among the most significant treasuries of performance and video art in Europe, holding key works by Ulay, Abramovi?, Serra, VALIE EXPORT, and beyond. It serves as both a chronicle and a living archive of artistic experimentation, continually informing and inspiring new generations.

Late in his career, and following a period of withdrawal after a stroke in 2006, Mike Steiner returned to the world of painting—turning toward abstraction with renewed vigor. His later works pulse with an internal dialogue between his varied interests: surface and time, gesture and documentation, presence and absence. Even his textile pieces from the final years echo this endless curiosity for the expressive frontier.

What, then, makes Mike Steiner persistently relevant in today’s contemporary arts landscape? Perhaps it is his sustained commitment to the experimental—his refusal to confine himself to a single label or genre. Steiner’s journey reminds us that the most vital art is forged in dialogue: between traditions and disruptions, media and moments, the intimate and the collective. To explore the legacy of Mike Steiner is not only to survey German art history but to be drawn into the living questions of what art can become.

For those with a passion for boundary-breaking contemporary art, the official Mike Steiner artist website offers further insights and imagery —a treasure trove for exploring his unique dialogue between painting, video, and performance.

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