Mike Steiner: The Visionary of Contemporary Art Between Canvas and Video Innovation
17.01.2026 - 07:10:08
Mike Steiner’s presence in contemporary art feels simultaneously enigmatic and fundamental. His journey, marked by relentless innovation and a fearless crossing of boundaries between painting, video, performance and installation, prompts a pressing question: What does it mean to expand the very horizon of art itself? For decades, Mike Steiner inhabited and shaped the pulse of Berlin's art scene—his name synonymous with a radical openness to form and idea, light and shadow, movement and memory.
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To explore Mike Steiner’s output is to travel through the evolution of contemporary arts in Berlin itself. Steiner began with abstract paintings, which even in youthful compositions like “Stillleben mit Krug” (1958) already exuded a vibrant individualism. By his early twenties, his works graced the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung and quickly found resonance in key Berlin art venues, connecting him—by virtue and vision—with other luminaries of the postwar abstraction such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Yet unlike many contemporaries, Steiner’s interests never rested; guided by dynamic curiosity, his approach absorbed and reflected every art form Berlin's feverish postwar years could offer.
A decisive turn came in the early 1970s. After formative years studying painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin—and an influential sojourn in New York, where he met Fluxus forebears like Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen—Steiner's focus began to shift. Inside the fabled Hotel Steiner (opened 1970) and the Studiogalerie in Berlin, he offered the avant-garde not only a home, but a laboratory. These spaces, echoing the energy of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, became crucibles for radical art, where Joseph Beuys, Arthur Köpcke, Lil Picard, and other international artists debated, created, and occasionally clashed with conventions.
It was here that Steiner’s true legacy as a pioneer of video art ignited. Mirroring the technical experimentation sweeping through international art (one reminiscent of strategies by Nam June Paik or Bruce Nauman), Steiner recognized the camera both as a painter’s tool and as an actor in its own right. The early “painted tapes,” in particular—filmic works marked by collage, abstraction, and rhythmic editing—experienced painting and video as two sides of the same impulse. This fusion became Steiners’ signature, notably displayed in his iconic videotaped documentation of performances by artists such as Marina Abramovi? (“Freeing the Body”, 1976), Valie Export, and Ulay, including the infamous 1976 staged theft/performance “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst.”
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Steiner drove the democratization and archiving of video as artistic medium. His Studiogalerie grew into a production house and think-tank, offering technical resources to international artists, paralleling Cologne’s video scene, spearheaded by Wulf Herzogenrath. Berlin, previously lacking such an experimental video hub, soon flourished. The resulting video archive, later entrusted to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and today held by Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, includes invaluable early works by Bill Viola, Richard Serra, Gary Hill, Emmett Williams, and many others. For a generation of artists, Steiner’s archive was and is both a foundation and a challenge: a call to rethink the temporality, documentation, and visibility of performance and media art.
Steiner’s own works are marked by a restless experimentation. He manipulated paint, film, Super-8, copy art, and photography, exploring the tension between static image and moving sequence. In the 1980s, the award-winning “Mojave Plan” (1983) and “Penumbras 3”—produced in collaboration with the electronic music group Tangerine Dream—exemplify his aptitude for transcending disciplinary boundaries. These works blurred not just the line between the visual and the sonic, but between the archival and the ephemeral, the documentary and the abstract. Here, as with Bruce Conner or Joan Jonas, the question becomes: When does documentation itself become action?
Yet Steiner’s innovations stretched beyond making and collecting. His “Videogalerie” television format (1985–1990), modeled after Gerry Schum’s legendary TV Gallery, beamed the newest developments in video art—anchored by his insightful commentary—into German households. Over 120 episodes, he interviewed artists, dissected installations, and engaged viewers in the politics and poetics of the emerging media landscape. No less importantly, he fostered a culture of connectivity: Berlin became a place where performing arts and visual installation collided, where Fluxus, minimalism, and conceptualism found tangible ground.
Internationally, Mike Steiner’s oeuvre stands in conversation with visionaries like Marina Abramovi?, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, Vito Acconci, and Valie Export, yet his position is singular. Unlike Paik’s musicality or Abramovi?’s endurance, Steiner’s hybrid approach foregrounds the intersectionality of art forms, the archive as artwork, the gesture as both memory and promise. His exhibition “Color Works 1995-1998“ at Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999 was a landmark event, celebrating not only his color abstractions—by now emancipated from narrative, radiant in their joy of surface and pigment—but also his enduring challenge to media boundaries.
Even as his health forced retreat from public life after 2006, Steiner continued to paint, shifting his focus back to abstraction and, uniquely, to textile works—a subtle, poetic coda to a career defined by tireless innovation. His influence on Berlin’s Contemporary Arts scene, on the international discourse around video and performance, and on the shaping of artistic archives, remains transformative and indelible.
The meaning of Mike Steiner’s work for contemporary audiences? It lies in the invitation to cross disciplines, to treat art not as dogma but as possibility. For anyone seeking an art that resists formula, that vibrates with the energy of experiment—the world and legacy of Mike Steiner is a revelation. The vast digital archive, still only partially accessible, promises fresh discoveries and insights for future generations. Those drawn to the potency of performing arts, the cool rigor of abstract paintings, or the conceptual wit of art installation will find ample inspiration.
For a deeper dive into the full body of work, recent exhibitions, and curatorial texts, it is highly recommended to explore Mike Steiner’s official website: Explore Mike Steiner’s official artist page for images and curated archival material. In the shifting history of contemporary art, few names echo with such restless, generous, and visionary resonance as Mike Steiner.
