Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Between Moving Images and Abstract Painting

What truly defines the potential of contemporary art? For Mike Steiner, this question was never just academic. His practice, visible across decades, genres and scenes, sought to dissolve borders between traditional painting and avant-garde experiment. Mike Steiner’s trajectory through the world of contemporary art is a vibrant tapestry where hotel salons echo with the spirit of the Chelsea Hotel, while camera lenses and paintbrushes are wielded with equal enthusiasm. His legacy, celebrated in exhibitions such as the major 1999 solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof — Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, underlines Steiner’s international relevance for Berlin’s ever-transforming art landscape.

Discover Mike Steiner’s key contemporary artworks — view the curated exhibition online here

Mike Steiner’s development as an artist followed a fascinating arc. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, his early postwar childhood in Berlin shaped a sensitive eye towards social realities and urban transformation — a sensibility that would resurface in his later video works and installations. Steiner’s entry into art came precociously: by age 17 he had already debuted at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. His studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin under Hans Jaenisch and later Hans Kuhn cemented his foundation not only in painting but in a restless search for new forms. It was here that Steiner first encountered the tensions later crucial to his art: the struggle between artistic “legitimacy” and the lure of experiment.

Fascinating here is the manner in which Mike Steiner absorbed global influences and re-injected them into Berlin’s art world. A pivotal moment: his stay in New York during the mid-1960s. Invited by the Ford Foundation, he forged links with key figures like Lil Picard and Allan Kaprow – the latter soon considered the godfather of the happening and Fluxus, central reference points of Steiner’s future work. Encounters with Al Hansen, Robert Motherwell and the experimental milieu of Pop Art and performance led him away from the confines of “pure” painting. It’s not surprising that early works saw him hang alongside other eventual luminaries like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke in exhibitions spanning Berlin, Geneva, Milan and Paris.

Yet Berlin would become his true crucible. In 1970, the founding of Hotel Steiner in West Berlin was an act of artistic defiance. Much like Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Hotel circle, Steiner’s hotel became a hub for the international avant-garde. German voices such as Joseph Beuys mingled with global performance innovators — creating an incubator for cross-media creativity. Little wonder, then, that Steiner was soon experimenting with avant-garde film and, by the early 1970s, video art.

What sets Mike Steiner apart among contemporary artists is his embrace of multiplicity. As both artist and catalyst for others, he operated at the heart of Berlin’s burgeoning performance and video scene. His Studiogalerie, founded 1974, became a production centre for media art, a stage for performance luminaries like Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Ulay and Carolee Schneemann, and a haven for producing and exhibiting the era’s most radical video experiments. His own pieces, as well as documentation of performances, are touchstones in the history of video art — notably his collaboration with Ulay for the legendary “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst” (1976), which saw a staged theft of Spitzweg’s iconic “Der arme Poet” and confronted audiences with the boundaries of art and criminality.

Beyond his role as facilitator and documentarian, Steiner was a relentless experimenter. In the 1980s, he explored the intersection of moving image and painting in his so-called “Painted Tapes” — fusions of video, abstraction, and manual intervention. Here we see a poetic continuation of abstraction by digital means, echoing the likes of Nam June Paik’s video manipulations or Bill Viola’s meditations on the frame, but always with a unique Berlin timbre: playful, sometimes rough, willfully unorthodox. The “Painted Tapes” in particular offer a synthesis rivaling contemporaries like Sigmar Polke’s experiments in photographic and painted interplay, or even the technical innovations of Gerhard Richter at the boundary of representation and process.

Key among Steiner’s achievements stands his collection and championing of video art at a time when Germany had no such scene to speak of — in contrast to Cologne, where Wulf Herzogenrath served as patron. Steiner’s acquisition of Reiner Ruthenbeck’s early video tapes and his drive to build an archive, eventually donated to Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, underscores the seriousness of his engagement. It’s no accident that his vast video collection now resides at the Hamburger Bahnhof, anchoring Berlin’s ongoing dialogue with the history of contemporary arts.

After the closure of his Studiogalerie in 1981, Mike Steiner’s energies shifted towards teaching, curating and — increasingly — back to painting. His return to the canvas was hardly a retreat: it marked renewed engagement with abstraction, often of luminous and geometric clarity. The major 1999 exhibition “COLOR WORKS” at Hamburger Bahnhof positioned these late paintings as anything but nostalgic — instead, they reactivated questions of surface, color, and space first addressed by his video and performance pieces. Steiner’s mature abstracts stand in dialogue with the international language of contemporary painting, referencing an ethos akin to that of Ellsworth Kelly, but always filtered through the experiential turbulence of Berlin’s cultural history.

His later years brought a turn toward textile works and photography, always seeking not just new media but new ways of seeing. The photo-cycle “Das Testbild als Readymade” (since 1983) offers a quiet, conceptual counterpoint to Steiner’s earlier performance energies — a testament to his astonishing range. Even after a serious stroke in 2006, Mike Steiner continued, more privately, to explore the meditative and the abstract — a fitting coda for a life lived at the artistic vanguard.

In comparing Mike Steiner with major figures such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Marina Abramovi?, his impact becomes unmistakable: where Paik globalised video art, Steiner rooted it in the gritty, open energy of Berlin’s Contemporary Arts scene; while Viola’s work is poetic, Steiner’s is socially charged, performative and immediate. Abramovi?’s enduring performance body finds a visual twin in Steiner’s documentation and facilitation, a partnership that enriched both legacies.

To the art lover, then, Mike Steiner’s legacy is defined by three core strengths: fearless experimentation, deep commitment to artistic community, and a unique vision that continually re-asks what contemporary art can be. His video archive remains a cornerstone of research and exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, while his paintings and installations beckon viewers still with their vibrancy and intellectual force. In a world ever more attuned to hybridity, Steiner’s oeuvre stands as a precedent and inspiration.

For those eager to immerse themselves in this creative universe, delve deeper into Mike Steiner’s works, texts and exhibitions via the official website: Explore historical context, critical writings, and exclusive images from the Mike Steiner estate

Mike Steiner’s art, spanning from Berlin’s bohemian brushstrokes to the digital pulse of performance video, proves that contemporary art need never stand still — nor should we. Take a closer look. It’s more than worth it.