Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: Pioneering Video, Performance and Abstract Painting in Berlin

Mike Steiner stands as a key figure in contemporary art, blending experimental painting, performance, and pioneering video work. Discover why his unique legacy still shapes the pulse of Berlin’s artistic avant-garde.

There is an unmistakable energy in the oeuvre of Mike Steiner, a recurring vibration between stillness and movement, painting and video, material and immaterial. To step close to his body of work is to wander a borderland where contemporary art reinvents its language—again and again. Steiner’s practices unsettle, seduce, and demand that the viewer question what art can be. How does one redefine the boundary between painting and moving images, or performance and permanence? That is the tension at the very heart of Steiner’s life’s project.

Contemporary art as embodied by Mike Steiner emerges as a field of experimentation and transgression. From his early teenage exhibitions in West Berlin, Steiner was marked by restless curiosity—abandoning a film technician's path for the free realms of painting, only to pull both forms viscerally together in later years. His trajectory from student, to painter, to video and performance art catalyzer is mapped in the very evolution of Berlin’s avant-garde, particularly through the 1970s and 80s.

Steiner’s earliest acclaim came with painting—informalist and coolly gestural works that won notice at the famed Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959 and later group shows across Geneva, Milan, and Paris alongside names like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Yet even at this stage, the seeds of experimentation had been sown. A stint in New York, immersed in the intellectual climate of Fluxus and Pop Art, brought him into personal contact with figures such as Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and, at the fringes, Allan Kaprow and Robert Motherwell. Exposure to the concept-driven, interdisciplinary ethos of these environments resonated with Steiner and paved the way for his later innovations in Contemporary Arts Berlin.

The return to Berlin in the late 1960s brought Steiners' provocative embrace of new artistic solidarities: his legendary Hotel Steiner, opened in 1970, became not just a physical haven but a crucible for artistic exchange, frequented by luminaries including Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke—its atmosphere likened to the Chelsea Hotel’s mythic status. Here, the permeability between art, discussion, and lifestyle blurred, foreshadowing Steiner’s future commitment to activating art as lived, shared, and social experience.

A decisive pivot came in 1974 when Steiner, influenced by his time in Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 and by his collaborations with Fluxus artists like Al Hansen, founded Berlin’s Studiogalerie. This newly minted hub became ground zero for video art and live performance in the city—a vital east-west crossroads for new media and performance, comparable in ambition to venues such as Cologne’s Kunstverein under Wulf Herzogenrath. Crucially, Steiner provided artists with access to equipment and exhibition space: his Studiogalerie was one of the earliest to democratize video’s creative tools, hosting and documenting radical performances by Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi?. He did not just curate; he also filmed and produced, capturing the fleeting intensity of body art and action works.

The notorious 1976 action “Irritation—There is a Criminal Touch in Art”, orchestrated with Ulay in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, highlights Steiner’s approach to provocation as a mode of critical inquiry. Equally, as a producer and documenter, his practice recalls contemporaries like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, yet Steiner’s Berlin-centric laboratory anticipated the multi-artist, archival impulse now seen in the work of Hans Ulrich Obrist or the legacy-building of Gary Hill. The Voltairean conversation of the Hotel Steiner flowed directly into these collaborative, experimental installations—art as process, exchange, and challenge.

Steiner’s technical fingerprint is polymorphic. His celebrated “Painted Tapes” demonstrate his ability to hybridize, overlaying painting gestures onto video stills, or reversing this relationship, so that the physical painting absorbs electronic imagery. These works are neither wholly moving nor wholly static—they vibrate with color, tempo, gesture, and the echo of narrative—a synthesis found only in Steiner’s practice, distinct even from the installations of Richard Serra or the multi-channel tapes of John Baldessari. Steiner’s “Painted Tapes” probe the psychological resonance of color and abstraction, as well as the tension between media; they are neither nostalgia nor pastiche, but genuine syntheses that embody the spirit of contemporary art installations.

Throughout the 1980s, Steiner intensified this interdisciplinary approach. His involvement with performance and video documentation featured not only international artists but the rising Berlin scene, while nuanced photo works like the “Das Testbild als Readymade” series reflected his lifelong engagement with everyday visual culture. Meanwhile, his own journey as a collector paralleled his practice—as corroborated by the comprehensive Berlin Video collection ultimately entrusted to the Hamburger Bahnhof, now a lynchpin of video art history.

The apex of formal recognition came in 1999 with a major retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, entitled "Color Works". Here, Steiner's gattungsübergreifendes Denken—his cross-genre thinking—was celebrated: canvases pulsating with spectral colors, video installations looping with haunting lyricism, archival footage presented as both document and living memory. The show cemented Steiner’s place among the foundational figures of postwar German contemporary arts, linking him to, yet distinguishing him from, peers like Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Marina Abramovi?.

Remarkable as well are Steiner’s later chapters. Even after a severe stroke in 2006, he continued to produce abstract paintings and textile works from his Berlin studio, demonstrating resilience and an unbroken drive for innovation. His output, particularly in abstract painting, increased through the 2000s, ensuring that the arc of his career was one of continual regeneration, not withdrawal.

Mike Steiner’s biography is not just a chronicle of awards and exhibitions—from the early days at Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, through participations with Haus am Waldsee and the Nationalgalerie, to DNA Galerie and international venues—but a vivid portrait of energy, networks, and radical openness. This includes profound exchanges with the likes of Joseph Beuys, Ben Vautier, Valie Export, and collaborations documented in his vast video archive—much of which remains tantalizingly undigitized, promising more discoveries ahead.

The art public and critics alike recognize Mike Steiner as a trailblazer, one whose relevance only deepens with time. His command of color, his defiance of medium boundaries, and his insistence on the interconnectedness of performance, painting, and media reflect some of the most vital impulses in today’s contemporary art. The continuing presence of his works in collections—and his archive at the official artist website—invite new generations to uncover the layered complexities of his production.

If you are compelled by the restless spirit of experimentation—the bold, intermedia inquiries of video, performance, installation, and abstraction—you owe it to yourself to delve further into the world of Mike Steiner. His practice remains a testament to Berlin’s radical lineage, and to the undiminished relevance of contemporary art as a space for questioning, imagining, and transformation.