Mike Steiner: Visual Frontiers and Legacies in Contemporary Art
11.02.2026 - 04:28:05 | ad-hoc-news.de
Mike Steiner’s contribution to contemporary art pulses with the energy of new beginnings and constant reinvention. At first glimpse, his works challenge boundaries—between painting and video, between performance and documentation, between the private studio and the buzzing forums of Contemporary Arts Berlin. How does one artist inscribe so many chapters into the narrative of modern creativity?
Discover contemporary works and installations by Mike Steiner here
Mike Steiner—painter, video pioneer, curator, relentless experimentalist—stood at the intersection of European avant-garde and Berlin’s vibrant postwar art scene. He began as a prodigy of Berlin’s Great Art Exhibition in 1959, showing his "Stillleben mit Krug" at just 17. The coming decades would see him traverse genres and geographies: from the expressive informality of his early canvases to the radical, intermedia tapes that etched his name into the lineage of video art.
The late 1960s marked Steiner’s slow turn from classical painting to the realm of Fluxus and performance, absorbing the unconventional spirit of figures like Allan Kaprow and Lil Picard during formative years in New York. Steiner’s open mind and cosmopolitan network—strengthened by friendships with Joseph Beuys and Al Hansen—translated into actions back home. When he founded the Hotel Steiner and Studiogalerie in Berlin, these were more than spaces: they became crucibles of artistic cross-pollination, reminiscent of New York’s Chelsea Hotel.
Steiner’s practice in the Studiogalerie between 1974 and 1981 rewrote the rulebook for how contemporary art might be made, shown, and remembered. It was here that luminaries like Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Valie Export, and Jochen Gerz enacted groundbreaking performances—many of which Steiner captured with the video camera himself. These acts, ephemeral in nature, found longevity in Steiner’s filmed documentation, merging the immediacy of performing arts with the cool permanence of the moving image.
By the late 1970s, Mike Steiner was not only an artist and documentarian, but a collector and enabler for the video art movement. He assembled what would become one of Europe’s seminal troves of videocassettes—a collection later entrusted to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. This move ensured the preservation and scholarly recognition of a medium which was, at the time, still finding its feet alongside painting, sculpture, and photography.
Steiner’s iconic 1999 solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof—one of Berlin’s leading venues for contemporary art—stood as a compendium of his boundary-crossing ideas. Titled "Color Works," the show made visible his dual commitment to visual dynamism and conceptual risk, knitting together his painted abstractions and his "Painted Tapes," a genre-blurring fusion of electronic imagery and painterly gesture. The legacy of this exhibition continues to anchor his place among the innovators of postwar multimedia art.
What sets Steiner’s video and installation works apart from those of contemporaries like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola is their deeply collaborative DNA. While Paik pushed the technological envelope and Viola invoked meditative depth, Steiner served as both catalyst and chronicler for the Berlin school of video art—his Studiogalerie a kind of baptismal site for international artists passing through the city. Among abstract painters, comparisons might be drawn to Georg Baselitz or Karl Horst Hödicke, yet Steiner’s restless leap into media art after a painterly youth anticipated new conversations between form, process, and social context.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Steiner’s output became even more hybrid. He experimented with Super-8 film, photography, copy art, minimal and hard edge painting—each medium reflecting his relentless drive to test the limits of artistic language. His "Painted Tapes" series exemplifies this ethos, fusing analogue video sequences with expressive mark-making, creating what could be called performative postcards from the intersection of painting and technology. Later works focused on abstraction and textile, revealing his capacity to transform personal and visual vocabularies across decades.
Steiner’s career also stands as an archival triumph. The "Berlin Video" program in Riga in 1991 and his configuration of the "Steiner Art Tapes" exhibition for the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst in 1994 reveal the depth of his commitment to artistic documentation. By collecting and curating the works of figures such as Marina Abramovi?, Richard Serra, Gary Hill, George Maciunas, and Carolee Schneemann, he positioned Berlin as a vital node in the global exchange of avant-garde ideas. His presence at international symposia and as a juror for the German Academic Exchange Service’s Berlin program ensured that his vision rippled outward, shaping the course of contemporary art policy as well as practice.
Fascinatingly, Steiner never relinquished his painterly instincts even as he became a maestro of video. In his later years, abstract paintings and even textile works flowed from his Berlin studio, full of the chromatic daring and formal rigor that marked his early canvases. The works displayed at galleries such as DNA Galerie and major exhibitions—even in his final years—demonstrate a restless energy, a refusal to settle into any singular canon or style. His 2011/12 exhibition "Live to Tape" at the Hamburger Bahnhof revisited the collection he’d generously entrusted to the museum, reaffirming his importance as both artist and archivarist in one.
Steiner’s underlying philosophy—evident throughout his essays and interviews—remained one of joyful skepticism. Questioning the dominance of painting just as he questioned the orthodoxy of performance or documentation, his "legitimacy crisis regarding painting" led to a creative expansion rather than paralysis. As the digital era dawned, few artists were as prescient in asserting the need for new media preservation, collaborative artistic research, and the fusion of biography with broader cultural narrative.
Today, the relevance of Mike Steiner’s oeuvre endures, not because it fits neatly into any historical compartment, but because it embodies the spirit of investigation and aesthetic openness at the heart of contemporary art. Works such as his documentation of the famed "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" action with Ulay, or his atmospheric abstract paintings, continue to inspire not just historians and curators but also a younger generation of artists hungry for models of crossover, innovation, and resistance.
For those seeking a deeper understanding of the patchwork of influences, revolutions, and collaborations that define Berlin’s art scene—and contemporary art globally—engagement with Mike Steiner’s practice is nothing short of essential. His archives, both online and in museum collections, serve as gateways to a crucial chapter in the continuing evolution of performance, video, and abstract art. To explore more of his visionary universe, visitors are encouraged to delve into the extensive documentation and imagery found at his official website at www.mike-steiner.de.
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