Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Between Painting, Video, and Performance

Contemporary art finds its pulse not least in the work of Mike Steiner, an artist whose name is entwined with both fearless innovation and enduring artistic curiosity. To try and place a label on Steiner’s practice is as futile as boxing light—a challenge he might have relished. What, after all, are the edges between a painted surface and an electronic image, between an installation and life itself? Steiner’s oeuvre invites us to observe, to doubt, to celebrate the ongoing metamorphosis of art as lived experience.

Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner: paintings, videos, and performance history here

In the spectrum of contemporary arts in Berlin and beyond, Mike Steiner remains a singular voice. Born in 1941 in what was then Allenstein, Steiner’s formative years in West Berlin exposed him early to an ever-evolving cultural topography. He took his first public bow at just 17 during the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, his debut marked by a still life painting already hinting at a restless creative potential. By age 20, enrolled at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, he delved into the free-spirited terrain of painting under Hans Kuhn’s mentorship, yet even then, he was never content to inhabit only one medium; parallel to his studies, he became entwined with the capitals’ bohemian art circles and alternative galleries.

This intermedial tendency—this refusal to choose—became Steiner’s signature. His brief sojourn in early 1960s New York placed him directly in the artistic ferment swirling around figures like Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and the inexhaustible Lil Picard. Time spent between Berlin and New York sharpened his awareness of international avant-garde movements: Fluxus, Happening, Video Art blossomed before his eyes. In particular, his involvement with Kaprow’s radical ideas on action and event permeated the conceptual anchors of Steiner’s later works—a bridge between German informel painting and American performative impulse.

Perhaps no place distilled Steiner’s vision more than his legendary Hotel Steiner in 1970s Berlin. Echoing the bohemian spirit of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, it became a crossroads for artists such as Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and their American counterparts. Here, at this cultural outpost on the Kurfürstendamm, artists debated through the night, blurring the lines between guest, host, and collaborator. Steiner’s willingness to provide space—physical and intellectual—was itself an artistic gesture, as alive as any painting or video.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Steiner found his way to video as both tool and medium. Inspired by experimental film developments he tracked in New York and mentored by artists like Al Hansen, Steiner began producing his first video works in the early 1970s. A sojourn to Maria Gloria Bicocchi’s Studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence—a hotbed of early video art—recast for him the possibilities of moving images. The result was a personal and artistic turning point. Disillusioned by what he perceived as the limitations of painting, Steiner embraced video’s immediacy and capacity for documentation, narrative, and live experience.

His Studiogalerie, founded in 1974 and soon relocated to the legendary Hotel Steiner, was instrumental for the burgeoning Berlin and European video art scene. It was not merely a gallery, but a laboratory for production, exhibition, and most importantly, action. Here, works by pioneers such as Marina Abramovi? ("Freeing the Body," 1976), Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Ulay found a hospitable ground. Steiner did not just provide equipment and space; he frequently documented performances and happenings himself, his restless eye both witness and shaper.

Indeed, the notorious 1976 performance “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” in which Ulay ‘stole’ Spitzweg’s “Der Arme Poet” from the Neue Nationalgalerie and placed it in a Kreuzberg living room, was orchestrated and documented by Steiner’s Studiogalerie. Such actions exemplified his belief that art is as much about the event as about its recording or its aftermath—an ethos entirely contemporary in spirit.

The Hamburg-based Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart recognized the full measure of his achievement with Steiner’s largest solo exhibition in 1999, “Color Works 1995–98.” These late works eloquently demonstrate how, after years immersed in video, performance, installation and even music video (his collaborations with Tangerine Dream are notable), Steiner returned to painting with a new consciousness. His abstract paintings from this period are marked by a tension between gestural immediacy and electronic mediation—a physicality of paint haunted by the ghost of the screen.

Comparisons to contemporaries such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill underscore Steiner’s significance. Yet, unlike Paik’s playful technological optimism or Viola’s meditation on spiritual immersion, Steiner always retained a dialectical relationship with his materials—using video to document the fleeting, painting to capture the ungraspable, and installation to reframe the audience’s participation. His work, never static, is a kind of ongoing negotiation with the evolving present.

Key to understanding his legacy is the vast video archive he built—beginning with a seminal 1974 purchase of a Reiner Ruthenbeck tape, growing into one of the most significant collections of early video art in Germany. In 1999, this archive was bequeathed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and remains a critical resource at the Hamburger Bahnhof, acting as both historical record and source of new curatorial energy.

Biographically, Steiner’s art is marked by the restlessness of a life spent traversing both geographic and conceptual borders. His progressive step from traditional painting to an open embrace of all media—super-8, installation, copy art, photography—reflects a relentless drive to experiment, never repeating himself, always searching for the new. His late engagement with abstract painting and textile work re-affirms this commitment, showing an artist never content to settle into a single idiom.

Fascinating, too, is his impact on performing arts and the facilitation of others’ creativity—a role rarely acknowledged with sufficient reverence in the annals of contemporary arts Berlin. As a curator, teacher, and juror, he passed on his intrepid spirit to younger generations and ensured the sustenance of Berlin’s experimental pulse.

So, what makes the art of Mike Steiner so enduringly relevant? Above all, it is his demonstration that art thrives when it is not contained—when it offers resistance to easy definition, when paintings bleed into videotapes, and performances linger as urban myth. His career is a testament to cross-pollination, to daring networks and new beginnings—essences at the very heart of avant-garde thinking.

For anyone eager to explore contemporary art beyond the boundaries of singular discipline or style, Mike Steiner’s work—presented in major exhibitions and accessible via his extensive online archive—is both an inspiration and a challenge. His archive, still only partially digitized, awaits new eyes and voices to keep the dialogue alive.

To delve deeper into the stories behind Mike Steiner’s iconic works, his legendary artist gatherings, and the ongoing relevance of his unique vision, a visit to the artist's official page is warmly recommended: Mike Steiner official artist website: Explore biography, collections, and a living archive

Mike Steiner’s legacy is, above all, a call to curiosity and to fearless experimentation—the lifeblood of the contemporary.