Mike Steiner: Mastering Contemporary Art at the Crossroads of Painting and Videowork

Mike Steiner’s name resonates powerfully within the world of contemporary art, echoing through decades as both innovator and instigator. But how does an artist translate the heartbeat of an era into visual language, rhythm, and installation? Standing at the vibrant intersection of abstract painting and video art, Steiner’s oeuvre invites this question with each bold stroke and flickering screen.

Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner—insights, paintings, and media art here

Steiner’s early entrance into the art world was nothing short of precocious. Having appeared at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung at just seventeen, he quickly moved from the structures of traditional painting toward something less tangible, yet immensely influential—performance, moving image, and a relentless investigation of artistic boundaries. Berlin, with its unique tension of tradition and reinvention, proved the ideal backdrop for his restlessly creative years.

What makes Mike Steiner’s art inimitable? The answer emerges most eloquently in the sheer breadth of his practice. While contemporaries such as Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys explored the boundaries of media, Steiner’s artistic DNA fused painting and the moving image. His so-called Painted Tapes epitomize this approach—blending videotape with painterly overlay, he created hybrid forms that brim with kinetic life. These works, much like the abstract paintings dominating his later years, pulse with a search for the new: for color as event, and surface as experiment.

One of the central chapters in Steiner’s evolution was the period surrounding the legendary Hotel Steiner and the Studiogalerie. Inspired by his intense period in New York with figures such as Allan Kaprow and Lil Picard, Steiner returned to Berlin and transformed these venues into vital meeting points for international avant-gardes. Here, artists like Valie Export, Marina Abramovi?, and Jochen Gerz realized performances that blurred the lines between life and art, many of which Steiner himself captured on video—testament both to his documentation instincts and his deep involvement in the pulse of Contemporary Arts Berlin.

This passion culminated in his pivotal role as both witness and actor within the Fluxus and performance scenes of the 1970s. It was Steiner and the Studiogalerie who hosted iconic actions, including Ulay’s notorious intervention at the Neue Nationalgalerie—an event emblematic of the era’s willingness to unsettle, provoke, and touch upon the taboo. These events were not mere spectacles, but living installations: art that breathed, performed, and insisted on evaluation in the moment rather than in institutional hindsight.

As a collector and facilitator, Mike Steiner built a video archive that is today legendary, containing works by luminaries such as Bill Viola, Allan Kaprow, and Gary Hill. The importance of this archive is underscored through its permanent home at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. It’s here that Steiner’s contributions as artist, documentarian, and curator converge: exhibitions such as the 1999 solo show Color Works placed his dual drive—as innovator of new forms and chronicler of artistic unrest—center stage.

Comparisons to artists like Bruce Nauman or Pipilotti Rist are tempting, yet ultimately insufficient—Steiner’s sense of the interactive, his commitment to process over product, sets him apart even within the global avant-garde. Where Nauman’s installations interrogate the body and perception and Rist’s videos invite immersive emotional states, Steiner’s works—especially the hybrid painted-video pieces—invite viewers to witness the friction of transition itself, between image and event, stillness and movement.

His later practice marked a quiet, perhaps almost meditative return to abstraction. “Abstrakte Malerei” became the focus of Steiner’s Berlin atelier, resulting in paintings and works on fabric suffused with atmospheric color and tactile lyricism. Yet even here, traces of his multimedia explorations linger: surface, color, and spatial tension are handled as performative elements, each canvas a microcosm of his ever-unstable search for meaning.

Guided by an unshakable faith in experiment, Steiner’s artistic trajectory was shaped by formative stays in the United States, deep immersion in Berlin’s bohemian circles, and friendships with some of the greatest artists of his age. The critical and poetic eye of Mike Steiner is omnipresent in his collected works, as well as the catalogues—like Color Works—documenting his restless journey across genres. Many of these texts and archival testimonies can be further explored via his official artist’s website.

The significance of Mike Steiner’s legacy is not simply in what he produced, but in how he created networks, fostered innovation, and refused the safe certainties of style or genre. His archival sensibility—his urge to document, collect, and catalyze new art forms—renders him as much zeitgenössischer Chronist as creator. His work in both the performing and visual arts stages the essential questions of its era: What is art, where does it belong, and who is permitted to define its borders?

Today, in an era increasingly shaped by hybrid artistic practices and the blending of digital and analog worlds, Mike Steiner’s art feels as present as ever. The radical hospitality of the Hotel Steiner, the visionary support for female and international artists, and the ever-surprising journey from paint to tape to light—these are living legacies, not just points in art history.

Those who wish to truly engage with contemporary art in Berlin or seek to understand the genealogy of video, performance, and abstract painting owe it to themselves to delve into his world. The works, texts, and unorthodox visions Mike Steiner brought into being remain vital signposts in the landscape of contemporary creation—a landscape best traversed with open eyes and a willingness to be surprised.