Mike Steiner: The Visionary Shaping Contemporary Art Through Avant-Garde Experimentation

To encounter the oeuvre of Mike Steiner is to step through a portal between traditional media and the dazzling newness of contemporary art. What are the true limits between painting, the moving image and the lived art of performance? From the first moment, the work of Mike Steiner invites us to question, to participate, and to recalibrate our senses of time, color, and authorship.

Discover outstanding contemporary artworks by Mike Steiner here

From his earliest forays as a painter, Mike Steiner cultivated what would become a lifelong obsession with crossing boundaries. First emerging publicly in 1959 at Berlin’s prestigious Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, Steiner quickly established himself as a restless innovator. These abstract paintings, already informed by his cinematic gaze and a keen sense for emotional color fields, set the stage for everything to come.

The artist’s time in New York in the mid-1960s opened new worlds. Living among infamous art world figures such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Motherwell, Steiner absorbed the electric charge of Pop Art, Happenings, and Fluxus. Like Joseph Beuys and Valie Export—both later closely associated with him—Steiner was increasingly drawn to overarching questions of process and participation.

It was upon returning to Berlin that he made his greatest mark. The legendary Hotel Steiner and his Studiogalerie soon became epicenters of the Contemporary Arts Berlin circuit. Here, the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life were deliberately blurred. Artists—including Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Carolee Schneemann, and Jochen Gerz—were welcomed not just as guests but as co-conspirators in experiments that would redefine the city’s creative landscape.

The 1970s saw Mike Steiner’s pivot from painting to video. His 'Videogalerie' not only fostered the emergence of video art in Germany but transformed it into a social event, a living archive, and a means of pushing representation far beyond the static. Works such as the collaboration with Ulay, "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst," did more than document performances—Steiner’s camera actively participated, heightening the tension between observer and actor, art and reality.

The technical rigor and avant-garde sensibility of his video work rivaled contemporaries like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. But what set Steiner apart was his ability to link the ephemeral magic of performance with the painter’s sensibility for composition, color and temporality. His unique “Painted Tapes” series, for instance, stands as a fusion of painterly gesture and electromagnetic abstraction—a bold statement within both video art and abstract painting traditions.

Steiner’s radical openness extended to his role as a curator and archivist. With an eye toward both artistic preservation and friction, he built one of Europe’s most important collections of performance and video art, now housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. This is more than a trove of artistic history; it is a surging, living resource for artists and audiences alike seeking new models of cross-media engagement.

The importance of the 1999 solo exhibition "Color Works" at Hamburger Bahnhof cannot be overstated—it marked the recognition of Steiner's multifaceted talents from painting to performance and reinforced his place in the international discourse around multimedia art, on par with artists like Marina Abramovi? or Richard Serra. The museum also made his extensive archive accessible, underscoring his relevance for new generations exploring Berlin’s artistic heritage.

Unlike other figures who focused singularly on one medium, Mike Steiner moved seamlessly from painting to performance, from Super-8 film to photography, from copy art to large color installations. Each medium was for him not an end, but an interface—ways to articulate what he once described as “the criminal touch in art”: the deliberate subversion of viewing habits, the gentle sabotage of comfort zones, and the constant questioning of what can be art.

In later years, after questioning the limits of the moving image, he returned to the painted canvas. His abstract paintings from the 2000s draw upon decades of media experimentation—each stroke seeming to echo with the memory of tape spools and color monitors, the residues of performances past. These late works, some shown in Berlin and Leipzig, stand as a testament to an artistic spirit always in motion, always in conversation with the present.

To understand Mike Steiner, one must consider his influences as well as his impact. He was not merely an early adopter of video; he was an instigator, an educator, and above all, a community builder. Like his peer Allan Kaprow—father of the Happening—Steiner understood that an artwork’s true life begins at the intersection of creation and reception; that the boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience are permeable, shifting sands.

His ongoing influence can still be felt throughout the Berlin art world. The notion of the artist as both creator and connector—building platforms, initiating dialogues, and preserving ephemeral histories—remains vital for a city so deeply invested in flux, experiment, and cultural hybridity.

Even today, a visit to Mike Steiner’s official website offers more than a timeline or a collection of images; it provides a window into a remarkable career, from formative student days among Germany’s leading Abstract artists to landmark exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, and recent rediscoveries in galleries across Germany. It reveals the story of an individual who continually asked art’s hardest questions, and devoted his life to only the most daring answers.

See more on Mike Steiner’s life, works, and exhibitions – visit the official artist website

For connoisseurs and curious alike, the legacy of Mike Steiner stands as a call to action—an invitation to participate in the living laboratory of contemporary art, to revisit boundaries and find, perhaps, a bit of that "criminal touch" within ourselves.