Mike Steiner: Pioneering Contemporary Art Between Painting, Video and Performance

Mike Steiner redefined contemporary art in Berlin, merging abstract painting, video art and performance. Explore why his impact at Hamburger Bahnhof and beyond continues to fascinate the art world.

In the pulsating landscape of postwar Berlin, few artists have blurred the boundaries of contemporary art as powerfully as Mike Steiner. Defined by a fearless versatility and an insatiable curiosity, Steiner’s artistic universe encompassed painting, video art, and legendary acts of performance, each work immersed in a spirit of experimentation. What lies at the heart of Steiner’s contemporary art, and how did he leave such an indelible mark on Berlin’s creative avant-garde?

From the very outset, Mike Steiner’s path was marked by independence. Born in East Prussia in 1941, raised in West Berlin, he entered the art scene precociously: at just seventeen, his "Stillleben mit Krug" appeared on the walls of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Early on, Steiner oscillated between painting and a fascination for the moving image, sparked during his formative years at the renowned Berlin art academy. Surrounded by the intellectual ferment of the Kreuzberger Forum and later, under the forward-thinking mentorship of artists like Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, Steiner’s academic foundation was both rigorous and iconoclastic.

Curiosity propelled Steiner to America; New York in the mid-1960s exposed him to the epicenter of Pop Art, Fluxus, and the nascent forces of performance. It was here that figures such as Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow broadened Steiner’s creative lexicon. The influence of these artists, known for pushing medium boundaries—just like contemporaries Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Marina Abramovi?—set the tone for Steiner’s multidisciplinary approach, which would later come to define much of Berlin’s contemporary arts culture.

Returning to Berlin, Steiner’s famous Hotel Steiner became a pivotal salon for international artists—the German equivalent of New York's Chelsea Hotel. Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and numerous American artists found both shelter and stimulus in its unique atmosphere. The Hotel and, later, his Studiogalerie were hotspots for artistic experiment, a tangible testament to Steiner’s philosophy: art thrives in dialogue, provocation, and public encounter.

However, it was video art that would ignite a profound transformation in his practice. Inspired by his exposure to experimental film in New York and his collaborations with Fluxus friends in the early 1970s, Steiner saw in video a revolutionary potential. He was unsatisfied with the limits of painting—his "legitimation crisis concerning painting" drove him to new media, as documented in his transition works and the founding of the Studiogalerie in 1974. There, Berlin’s first independent video and performance gallery emerged, purposely equipped to support other artists with high-end video equipment, much like the pioneering studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence.

The Studiogalerie became the beating heart of performance art in Berlin, hosting the likes of Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Jochen Gerz, and especially Marina Abramovi?. These alliances with the feminist avant-garde and performance icons reflected Steiner’s open embrace of the contemporary and the radical. One of the most notorious moments—organized in 1976 with Ulay—was the performative theft of Spitzweg’s "Der arme Poet" from the Neue Nationalgalerie, an act choreographed as art, jointly filmed, and critically accompanied by Steiner. This act of institutional critique, blending legality, performance, and documentation, remains a bold touchstone in Berlin’s art history. In its spirit, Steiner can be seen alongside conceptual pioneers such as Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman, artists who interrogated the systems of the art world from within.

Steiner’s own works from the 1970s and 80s reflect this complex interplay of media: minimal abstraction, "Painted Tapes" that fused painted screens with vivid video overlays, and enduring documentation of ephemeral performances. These experimental works, at home in the same conversations as those of artists like Pipilotti Rist or Gary Hill, evince a poetic intersection of color, duration, and spatial presence—components that became central to his later periods as well.

During the 1980s, Mike Steiner went further to democratise contemporary art. With his television project "Videogalerie," broadcast from 1985 to 1990, he singlehandedly produced and moderated over 120 episodes, giving an entire generation of viewers access to cutting-edge contemporary arts. Themes ranged from artist interviews to festival reports, and works from the likes of Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, and Ulay became staple viewing across cable TV in Berlin, mirroring the public accessibility championed by Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie.

Not to be underestimated, Steiner’s role as a collector and archiver also shaped Berlin’s contemporary art landscape. His vast video collection—housing works by George Maciunas, Valie Export, Bill Viola, Allan Kaprow, and others—was eventually entrusted to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in 1999. Its permanent home within the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart was crowned with the blockbuster 1999 solo exhibition "Color Works," a sweeping homage to Steiner’s painterly and video-based achievements. This show not only celebrated his cross-genre work, but placed him side by side with international luminaries like Georg Baselitz and Allan Kaprow, both present in his early exhibition circles and later in the museum context.

Steiner’s artistic journey never ceased to evolve. Even after a stroke in 2006, he returned quietly to his Berlin studio, focusing on abstraction and fabric works in his final years. Throughout his long career, his work was always animated by a search for synergy: between form and flux, painting and performance, tradition and technical innovation.

Why is Mike Steiner’s work so resonant for contemporary audiences? Partly, it is his undogmatic embrace of experiment. Each phase, from the early abstract paintings to "Painted Tapes" and monumental video installations, reveals a restless intellect keen to marry the optical with the conceptual. His legacy lives on in Berlin’s contemporary arts ethos, visible in the ongoing relevance of places like Hamburger Bahnhof and in the cross-pollination of media and genres that has become the norm in today’s art institutions.