Mike Steiner and the Art of Breaking Boundaries – Contemporary Art Reimagined

To speak of Mike Steiner is to confront the electrifying pulse of contemporary art head-on. His career, spanning mediums and decades, reads like a vivid answer to a looming question: how can an artist constantly dissolve and redraw the boundaries between painting, performance, and the moving image? Mike Steiner’s legacy is one of perpetual reinvention—a restless artistic spirit whose journey stands at the intersection of painting, video, and a relentless curiosity for new forms.

Discover contemporary masterpieces by Mike Steiner here

Mike Steiner’s oeuvre is not easily contained. Born in Allenstein in 1941, he swiftly moved in the avant-garde circles of West-Berlin, developing his craft in postwar Europe’s most kinetic city. Early on, his inclination for experimentation set him apart—already a painter in his youth, he soon gravitated towards conceptual art and abstraction. By 1959, Steiner had debuted at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Paris, Geneva, Milan—these cities bore witness to his works in the years that followed, aligning him with German contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Steiner’s art flirted with Pop Art and Minimalism, but he never settled; he pushed further, asking what else art could become.

The 1970s signaled a seismic shift in Steiner’s practice. No longer satisfied with the confines of painting, he dove into the nascent world of video art. Encounters in New York—with Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, Robert Motherwell—seeded his fascination for Fluxus, Happenings, and new media. On return to Berlin, Steiner’s establishments, the legendary Hotel Steiner and later the Studiogalerie, became havens for artists and performers from Joseph Beuys to Valie Export. These spaces didn’t just house art; they instantiated it through action, performance, and radical exchange. Many in the Contemporary Arts Berlin community still recall how these venues shaped entire waves of cultural production in the capital.

The Studiogalerie, and Steiner’s relentless commitment to new forms, proved transformative. Adopting video as both a tool and a subject, Steiner collaborated with figures like Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Jochen Gerz, and Carolee Schneemann. His videos were not mere documentation but a form of art in themselves—timed, composed, and conceptually precise. Notably, his documentation of Ulay’s notorious action "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" (1976) at the Neue Nationalgalerie remains a touchstone in the literature of performance art. The fusion of moving images, performance, and documentary precision would become a through-line in Steiner’s approach, one echoed by contemporaries like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola—artists with whom Steiner shared both exhibition space and conceptual kinship.

The breadth of Mike Steiner’s artistic production in Germany was recognized in 1999 with his major solo exhibition "Color Works" at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, home to many of his collected video works. This exhibition captured the depth of his engagement with color, abstraction, and the interplay of light and movement. Steiner’s paintings from this later period shimmer with chromatic intensity—abstract works that resonate with the avant-garde, yet remain deeply personal in their lyricism and spatial dynamics. To compare, the meditative fields recall Gerhard Richter’s color explorations, while their vibrant immediacy aligns Steiner with contemporaries like Sigmar Polke or Imi Knoebel, though always with his unmistakable synthesis of painting and time-based media.

Steiner’s tireless engagement with the art world was not confined to his own production. He was a dedicated mentor, collector, and advocate. His ground-breaking TV format "Videogalerie" (1985–1990)—more than 120 episodes—helped bring video art from artists like Bill Viola, Gary Hill, and Richard Serra into German living rooms, long before contemporary art was mainstream culture. Through these efforts, he elevated Berlin’s standing as a global hub for interdisciplinary art. His collection, now preserved by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and found in the Hamburger Bahnhof, remains one of Europe's key archives of video and performance art from that turbulent era.

In the 1980s and beyond, Steiner’s artistic curiosity never waned. Alongside video, he revived his passion for painting, exploring abstract compositions and unique techniques such as his "Painted Tapes"—works that merged hand-painted interventions with recorded action, creating hybrids of image and event. His later years saw an intimate turn: abstract paintings, photo cycles like "Das Testbild als Readymade," and even textile works, made in quiet concentration in his Berlin studio. Each phase, each medium, bears the hallmark of Mike Steiner’s singular vision: restlessly searching, never satisfied, elegantly weaving together the seemingly incompatible to render something strikingly new.

As a cultural engine, Mike Steiner stands shoulder to shoulder with icons like Joseph Beuys—whom he counted as a friend—and even artists such as Marina Abramovi?, who performed in his spaces. Yet, Steiner’s name is often uttered with a particular sense of reverence among Berlin’s cultural historians: here was not just a maker, but a catalyst, a chronicler, and an ambassador for contemporary, performative, and media-based art.

His legacy, while firmly anchored in the twentieth century, continues to exert gravitational pull on today’s artists and thinkers. The intertwining of painting and video, the championing of performance, the unwavering belief in art’s power to question and connect—these are threads running through Berlin’s current artistic fabric, evident in spaces and exhibitions from the Hamburger Bahnhof to independent Contemporary Arts Berlin venues.

For those seeking to grasp the pulse and poetry of contemporary art, Mike Steiner’s work presents an invitation. Visit his official website—a treasure trove of biographical insights, texts, and image galleries—to understand not just the trajectory of an artist, but the evolution of art itself. The journey stretches across disciplines and decades, yet feels timeless in its urgency and vision.

For deeper insights and a visual archive of Mike Steiner’s work, explore the official artist website

Mike Steiner reminds us: contemporary art is neither a style nor a moment—it is a living discourse, one that he shaped, documented, and ultimately embodied.