Mike Steiner: Between Canvas and Camera – Pioneering Contemporary Art with Vision and Experimentation
12.01.2026 - 13:28:07
Mike Steiner was not only an artist; he was a phenomenon in the world of contemporary art. The unique fusion of media, audacious conceptual approaches and pioneering energy in his works continue to animate the halls of the Hamburger Bahnhof and deeply influence the spirit of contemporary arts in Berlin. But how does one capture the restless motion at the heart of Mike Steiner’s creative journey, which perpetually questioned the boundary between image and event, painting and performance?
Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner – explore paintings, videos, and installations here
At the core of Mike Steiner’s artistry was a rare ability to reinvent himself and his mediums. Beginning as a painter, Steiner displayed early talent, first exhibiting at just seventeen at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. His initial canvases, notably the "Stillleben mit Krug," showed an affinity with informel tendencies, placing him among names like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke in Berlin’s emerging post-war movement. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Steiner’s curiosity for new forms and philosophical rigor led him further – out of the painting studio and into the heartbeat of world avant-garde.
Key to Steiner’s cosmopolitan ethos were his international encounters, especially in the electrifying New York scene of the 1960s. Living with Lil Picard, a well-connected artist and journalist, he encountered figures such as Allan Kaprow, the progenitor of Happenings, and moved in circles around artists like Robert Motherwell. These experiences decisively shifted his focus to process, temporality, and direct audience engagement – premonitions of his later turn to performance and Videokunst.
One could say Mike Steiner became a living hinge between classic and contemporary art. Upon returning to Berlin, he founded the legendary Hotel Steiner—aptly compared to the Chelsea Hotel, epicenter for artists like Andy Warhol. The hotel swiftly became a melting pot of German and international artists, fostering collaboration and performance and echoing the transatlantic ferment that defined 1970s contemporary arts in Berlin.
Around 1974, Steiner reached a creative crossroads: his growing skepticism of painting’s boundaries led to a leap into video as an emergent medium. Inspired by experimental film developments witnessed in New York, Steiner saw in video the means to document, disrupt, and democratize art. It is no coincidence that figures like Fluxus-great Al Hansen and performance icon Marina Abramovi? gravitated toward his Studiogalerie, founded the same year. Here, Steiner not only embraced international performing arts traditions but also became their chronicler, camera in hand.
Steiner’s Studiogalerie was a crucible of innovation, offering artists not just exhibition space but also essential tools – video cameras, editing bays – all rare commodities in 1970s West Berlin. The gallery became an indispensable node for artists ranging from Valie Export to Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Ulay. The famous 1976 project with Ulay, "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst," in which a Spitzweg painting was 'removed' from the Neue Nationalgalerie and 'liberated' to a Kreuzberg living room, remains emblematic of the era's radical critique and play with authorship, property and public space.
Much of the essential vitality of Steiner’s work lies in this interplay of image and action, and his willingness to seize risk as a creative motor. As producer, cameraman, and sometimes performer, Steiner documented fleeting moments of performance art that would otherwise have vanished – works such as Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body" persist thanks to his intervention. The overlaps with his Fluxus peers like Ben Vautier and Allan Kaprow are not accidental; Steiner was both a chronicler and an instigator of the ephemeral turn in contemporary art.
However, Steiner’s artistic investigation did not stop at video and performance. The 1980s saw an increased fascination with the hybridization of media: his "Painted Tapes" fused painterly gesture with video signal, dissolving the last distinction between canvas and screen. So too his abstract paintings of later years, with their vibrant surface and embrace of spontaneous processes, can be seen as a continuation of the search for pure expression through material and medium. Performing arts, abstract paintings, and time-based installations all seem to co-exist within his creative horizon.
The magnitude of Mike Steiner’s contribution is visible not only in his own œuvre but also in the legacy of his collecting and curatorial work. His archive of videotapes – one of the most important private collections of international video art, including works by Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, Marina Abramovi?, and Richard Serra – was bequeathed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and is held today at Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. This act secured a vital part of contemporary arts history for Berlin, making Steiner both a guardian and a creator of shared memory.
Steiner’s major solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999, "Color Works", was a high point, bringing together his genre-defying artistic and curatorial legacy. The show illuminated not just the breadth, but the remarkable coherence of his vision: a practice that continuously circled around the interplay of color, light, temporality and the limits of perception. In subsequent years, exhibitions at prominent venues in Berlin, Leipzig, and internationally – from DNA Galerie to the J.J. Brookings Gallery in San Francisco – have reaffirmed his status as a formidable force in contemporary art, a peer of visionaries like Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, and pioneers of performance and new media worldwide.
Crucially, Mike Steiner’s biography is inseparable from the rhythm of Berlin itself: a city marked by rupture, reinvention, and ceaseless artistic exchange. His formative involvement as juror, teacher at institutions like the DFFB, and organizer of boundary-pushing events, as well as his turn toward contemporary abstract painting in his later years, cement his reputation as someone who never ceased to explore or to inspire.
What remains so fascinating is the way Mike Steiner’s work anticipates contemporary debates about mediation, authorship, and participation. Whether through the tactile immediacy of his abstract paintings or the analytic gaze of his video lens, Steiner’s art asks us to look again, to look differently. He remains, perhaps more than any of his generation, a restless bridge builder between fields and times.
For anyone seeking immersion in the most dynamic traditions of contemporary art, a closer acquaintance with Mike Steiner’s life and works is essential. His legacy echoes in the collections and exhibitions of Berlin, but most powerfully in the continued challenge his art offers to see, feel, and think in new ways. For a deeper dive into his vast œuvre and the histories it activates, a visit to the official Mike Steiner artist website is warmly recommended. There, vivid imagery and archival resources await, waiting to ignite the next conversation about the boundaries and the future of contemporary art.
