Mike Steiner: Between Painting and Video – Contemporary Art Reimagined

What happens when painting meets performance, and video becomes as vital as the brushstroke? Mike Steiner, a name synonymous with contemporary art in Berlin, challenged the very fabric of artistic practice. His works pulse, disrupt, and invite us to rethink the spectrum between moving image and static canvas. Walk into any room touched by Steiner’s hand, and the question lingers: where does art end, and does it ever truly begin?

Discover contemporary masterpieces by Mike Steiner in this exclusive online exhibition

Mike Steiner’s impact on contemporary arts in Berlin and beyond cannot be separates from his pioneering approach to artistic media. Starting in the late 1950s, Mike Steiner was already shaping the Berlin scene as one of the youngest exhibitors at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. While rooted in painting, his creative trajectory soon curved into uncharted territory: by the 1970s, Steiner had become a vanguard of video art, elevating Berlin as a hotspot for international avant-garde movements.

Key Work Groups and Artistic Media
Early in his career, Steiner worked energetically in abstract painting, aligning himself with the likes of Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke in international exhibitions. But he was never content with staying within the confines of oil and canvas. The 1970s saw Steiner’s restless curiosity bring forth some of the earliest video art ever produced in Germany, often in collaboration with figures such as Al Hansen—an influential name from the Fluxus movement, alongside Allan Kaprow and Ben Vautier.

His legendary Studiogalerie (founded in 1974) soon became Berlin’s epicenter for performative and audiovisual creativity. Here, Mike Steiner provided a platform—and, crucially, state-of-the-art equipment—for a generation of artists exploring the cutting edge of performance, Fluxus, and experimental media. Names like Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Jochen Gerz are inseparable from Steiner’s history; each found support and documentation within his visionary space.

Distinctive is the breadth of Steiner’s oeuvre: from large-scale abstract paintings in the 1990s (culminating in his major solo exhibition "Color Works" at Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999) to the remarkable fusion pieces he termed "Painted Tapes." Always, his art rides the boundary between stillness and motion, presence and documentation.

Comparatively, Steiner’s exploratory zeal places him with luminaries such as Nam June Paik—whose video sculptures fundamentally changed global perceptions of the medium—or Bill Viola, noted for meditative, immersive videos. But Steiner’s Berlin context lent his work a unique edge: it was rawer, engaged more directly with the city’s artistic cross-currents, and consistently functioned as both artist and facilitator.

Milestones: Fluxus, Video, and the Hamburger Bahnhof
One of Steiner’s most iconic moments was the 1976 performance "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst," developed with Ulay and documented by Steiner in his signature video style. This boundary-blurring action—centering around a subversive "theft" of a famous Spitzweg painting—epitomizes the spirit of contemporary art’s interrogation of value and authenticity.

His impact deepened with a series of initiatives: from producing over 120 broadcasts for his cable-TV show “Videogalerie” (1985–1990) that exposed videokunst to a wider German audience, to amassing one of the largest private collections of international video art. In 1999, the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart—mounted the large-scale retrospective "Color Works," a vivid testament to Steiner’s enduring relevance and his radical approach to color, abstraction, and media interplay.

The collection he gifted now forms the foundation of the moving-image archive at Hamburger Bahnhof, including rare documents of works by international stars as well as ephemeral Berlin performances. Alongside contemporaries like Gary Hill and Richard Serra, Steiner asserted a kinetic visuality—art as both record and event.

Background: Education, Networks, and Artistic Philosophy
Born in 1941 in East Prussia and raised in the cultural vortex of post-war Berlin, Mike Steiner experienced both the darkness of history and the liberating force of creative exchange. After studies at the Berlin University of the Arts—mentored by Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn—Steiner’s approach was indelibly marked by his experiences in New York. There, the likes of Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow introduced him directly to the heady energies of Fluxus, Pop Art, and Happenings.

This cosmopolitan breadth would inform every chapter of his career. As the founder of the Hotel Steiner, he made Berlin a hub for international exchange, hosting guests such as Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke. His spaces were never mere studios or galleries—they were artistic laboratories, filled day and night with debates, performances, and spontaneous collaborations.

Mike Steiner’s archive—much of it still awaiting digitization—is itself a vibrant testimony to this ethos. As both participant and documentarian, he ensured that fleeting acts of performance or experimental video did not simply vanish into history.

Relevance, Reception, and Critical Resonance
What lends Mike Steiner’s work its continued urgency? Partly it is his willingness to embrace the unresolved, to revel in the energy of the interdisciplinary and the ephemeral. Steiner’s performances, installations, and videos refuse to separate art from experience—viewers are asked not merely to look, but to question the very structure of perception.

His large-format abstract paintings, particularly those from the