Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: A Visionary Journey from Painting to Video Innovation
14.01.2026 - 07:03:05
Few figures in contemporary art have so thoroughly embodied the restless spirit of exploration as Mike Steiner. At once painter, video artist, performer, gallerist, and collector, he carved out a place for himself in Berlin’s creative landscape that remains unparalleled. What happens when the act of painting collides with the electronic pulse of video? Steiner’s work offers a compelling, at times provocative, answer to this central question of twentieth-century art.
Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner – Explore highlights from his oeuvre here
Mike Steiner’s journey began in Allenstein (now Olsztyn, Poland) in 1941, shaped by an East Prussian childhood and, after WWII, the vivid turbulence of Berlin. By age 17, he boldly debuted at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, signaling a path already set apart by precocity and independence. The art world beckoned: After studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin, Steiner plunged into international networks, aided by a formative stay in New York. There, critical encounters with artists like Lil Picard, Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow, and the fluxus movement seeded an enduring fascination with the limits of artistic media.
What ultimately distinguishes Mike Steiner’s legacy within contemporary arts in Berlin is not only his prolific output, but the cross-pollination of genres and a tireless desire to unsettle conventions. If the Hamburger Bahnhof’s 1999 retrospective Color Works crowned his achievements, it was because it shone a light on an intricate web of associations—between painting and moving image, abstraction and documentation, private initiative and public dialogue.
In his early years, Steiner’s work drew on the expressive threads of informel painting and emerging pop art discourses. Paintings such as his ‘Stillleben mit Krug’ (1958) recall the sensibility of contemporaries like Georg Baselitz and even hint at a kinship with the gestural abstraction of K.R.H. Sonderborg. Yet, what set him apart was a growing conviction that painting alone could not harbor the full force of artistic exploration.
The early 1970s marked a radical shift—a ‘legitimation crisis’ concerning the boundaries of painting, as Steiner reflected in later writings. Influenced by the experimental film and live-action currents in New York, and invigorated by friendships with fluxus and performance artists such as Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, he turned increasingly to video and intermedia work. Steiner’s time at Studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence (on Kaprow’s invitation) catalyzed original video artworks, laying the groundwork for his signature cross-genre approach.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the Hotel Steiner and its successor, the Studiogalerie, for Berlin’s art scene. From 1970 onwards, these sites became microcosms of international avant-garde practice—compared by some to New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. A crucible for innovation, Hotel Steiner welcomed Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and a wide transatlantic circle, while the Studiogalerie (1974–79) focused explicitly on video, performance, and the nurturing of emerging tendencies in Fluxus and intermedia art.
Through these spaces, Steiner did not just create; he facilitated. He provided expensive, otherwise inaccessible video equipment for local and international artists—an almost subversive act of democratizing the tools of creative production. Figures such as Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi? developed and executed boundary-pushing actions, their ephemeral energy preserved by Steiner’s insistent documentation.
One iconic example is his collaboration with Ulay in 1976 for ‘Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst.’ Orchestrating and filming the notorious “theft” of Spitzweg’s ‘Der arme Poet’ from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Steiner turned an act of performance into a meditation on art, property, and institutional authority. Such events did not exist in isolation; they echoed broader avant-garde currents worldwide—think of Nam June Paik’s disruptions or the radical body art of Marina Abramovi?.
But Mike Steiner was never content with merely recording. Throughout the eighties and beyond, his creative restlessness led him through Super-8 film, photography, copy art, slide series, and, most distinctively, “Painted Tapes.” These hybrid works—melding painted gestures with electronic video overlays—anticipate the immersive, postmedium strategies now common in international exhibitions. One could draw a loose comparison to artists like Bill Viola or Gary Hill, noted for their multimedia fusion and poetic investigations of perception; or even to Bruce Nauman’s studio experiments bordering between video, body, and installation.
During his stewardship of the TV format ‘Videogalerie’ (1985–1990), Steiner acted as both chronicler and propagandist for the emerging field of video art. His more than 120 broadcast programs not only showcased pieces from his expansive collection (including works by Richard Serra, Allan Kaprow, and George Maciunas) but shaped public reception of video as an equal and vital component of contemporary art.
Organizationally, his legacy rests also in the singular Berlin Video collection, later bequeathed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and now housed at Hamburger Bahnhof. These archives are a living testimony to the era’s exuberance and the interconnectedness of art movements from Berlin to Seoul, from Fluxus through Neo-Expressionism, from activism to abstraction.
In the closing decades of his life, particularly post-2000, Steiner returned with renewed fervor to abstract painting and textile-based works—always guided by a subtle interplay of chance, materiality, and structural rigor. Critics at the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition noted an unbroken thread: the desire to translate the fleeting nature of video and performance into the physical, tactile presence of paint and fabric.
The resonance of Mike Steiner’s art lies in its invitation to questioning. What is an artwork if not a happening? How does one capture the momentary and give it form? How do we document, interfere, and remember? Anyone drawn to contemporary discourse—be it in painting, performing arts, or the now omnipresent world of video—will find in Steiner’s trail a legacy of experimentation, generosity, and unyielding curiosity.
Mike Steiner’s relevance endures, not just as a pioneer, but as a restless innovator whose curiosity kept Berlin’s contemporary arts moving forward. Exploring his archive and works is an act of reconnecting with the questions at the heart of all creative practice—boundaries, possibility, and the joy of experiment.
