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

With Mike Steiner, contemporary art found a restless spirit who dissolved boundaries between painting, video, and performance, leaving a unique mark on the Berlin art scene and beyond.

Contemporary art is rarely as dynamic, unruly, and deeply human as in the oeuvre of Mike Steiner. It is almost impossible to step into the world of Steiner's works without wondering: How does one reinvent art time and again—and where do painting, the moving image, and lived performance truly meet?

From his early beginnings in the fifties, Mike Steiner's artistic drive was evident: born in Allenstein in 1941, raised amidst the defining turmoil of postwar Berlin, Steiner made his first public appearance at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959—just seventeen, presenting an oil still life that signaled a penchant for experimentation. It was more than youthful ambition; here was a precursor to a restless career that would soon eclipse the confines of traditional painting.

Steiner’s academic path at the Berlin University of the Arts exposed him to the intellectual ferment of a city straddling past and present. Mentored by influential figures like Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, he gravitated toward Informal painting before international winds swept him off to the United States. In New York, he moved in the circles of the avant-garde—Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow, fathers of Happenings and Fluxus, became his interlocutors. The proximity to artists such as Robert Motherwell embedded Steiner in a transatlantic dialogue, seeding his discontent with boundaries between genres.

What distinguishes Mike Steiner in the landscape of contemporary arts in Berlin is not merely his output as a painter or video artist—it is his compulsion, almost obsession, to create fertile places for collective experimentation. The fabled Hotel Steiner, opened 1970 near Kurfürstendamm, summoned the spirit of the Chelsea Hotel; artists like Joseph Beuys and others found not only accommodation but a crucible for ideas. This was not simply hospitality, but the founding of living artistic infrastructure—a model echoed in today’s creative hubs.

The mid-seventies marked Steiner’s decisive movement from canvas to video. Prompted by his experiences in New York and under the spell of Kaprow’s invitation to Florence’s Studio Art/Tapes/22, Steiner turned away from painting’s material limits toward the uncharted space of moving images. His early collaborations with Al Hansen and innovations in video media stand as milestones in a European context then still skeptical of video art’s artistic credibility. Indeed, a persistent skepticism toward painting’s ability to encapsulate contemporary experience drove Steiner into the arms of the camera; his “legitimacy crisis” regarding painting reflected the international transformations of that era as artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola simultaneously claimed space for video worldwide.

Yet Steiner was far more than a practitioner. His Studiogalerie—first in Berlin’s Ludwigkirchstraße, then in the now-legendary Hotel Steiner—emerged as a ground zero for the burgeoning video and performance art scene. Here, intermedia groups, international visitors, and rising stars of feminist and performative art (Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Jochen Gerz, Marina Abramovi?) staged happenings, documented not merely for the present but for posterity by Steiner himself. Notably, performances like Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body" and the infamous "Irritation - Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" with Ulay (the temporary theft of Spitzweg’s painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie) were both orchestrated, witnessed, and archived through Mike Steiner’s initiative.

The approach echoes that of figures like Joseph Beuys, but Steiner’s blend of curation, participation, and documentation remains unique. While his contemporaries Allan Kaprow and George Maciunas pushed the envelope on the east coast of the USA, Steiner infused Berlin’s scene with this international spirit—bridging Fluxus, conceptual art, and avant-garde media experiments. His painted tapes—works fusing video and painting—stand as evidence of a hybrid vision, challenging the purity of any one medium, much as Bruce Nauman or Gary Hill would later do.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw Steiner’s visionary efforts further through the TV-based "Videogalerie," a cable-television format which gave rare, regular visibility to new video artworks and international discourses in art. Over 120 broadcasts brought not only his own work, but fellow artists' voices and new movements into German living rooms, years before such pluralism would be taken for granted. In this aspect, Mike Steiner anticipated trends in public art mediation that major institutions—such as Hamburger Bahnhof—would only later institutionalize.

Steiner’s importance is highlighted by the Nationalgalerie’s acquisition of his video collection, now a core of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s contemporary art holdings. The major solo exhibition "Color Works" in 1999 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, honored not only the painter and the video pioneer, but the unstoppable synthesist—someone who could not help but move between action, image, and idea.

What of his late work? Even as he withdrew from public life after his 2006 stroke, Steiner refocused on abstract painting, continuing to produce compelling canvases and textile works into the twenty-first century. His journey in abstract painting stands intriguingly beside his video experiments, offering viewers an immersive rethink of the autonomy of painting in the digital age—a question as relevant in the age of Gerhard Richter as of Nam June Paik or Bill Viola.

To survey what Mike Steiner achieved is to see the making of a truly contemporary artist—one who was never content to sit still. His restless spirit, combined with a genius for collaboration and community-building, shaped the Berlin scene and continues to ripple through contemporary art discourse. His works, from early abstract paintings to experimental video installations and performance documentations, collectively map out not just an individual biography, but the evolution of contemporary arts in Germany and internationally.

Those who wish to engage more deeply with Mike Steiner’s legacy are encouraged to explore the artist’s official site at www.mike-steiner.de—there, you will find detailed biography, seminal works, and the ongoing story of an artist whose drive for innovation remains as vibrant as ever. Steiner’s art reminds us: contemporary art is always in motion—provocative, generous, unpredictable, and, above all, endlessly open to interpretation.