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

How do you navigate the boundaries of painting, video, and performance art in a single lifetime? In the synopsis of German contemporary art, Mike Steiner stands out as a figure who not only traversed these disciplines but redefined their intersections. His oeuvre, stretching from youth paintings to iconic ‘Painted Tapes’ and pioneering video documentation, is among the most charged and multifaceted eras of Contemporary Arts Berlin. Entering a Steiner exhibition is like stepping into a living chronicle of abstraction, rebellion, and artistic invention—the air vibrates with questions about the limits of media and the legacy of human touch in a digital age.

Discover unique contemporary artworks by Mike Steiner and explore his creative universe here

Mike Steiner’s journey began in Allenstein in 1941 but truly unfolded against the vibrant, tumultuous postwar backdrop of West Berlin. As a prodigious talent, Steiner first exhibited as a teenager at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung and moved through the city’s bohemian enclaves, influenced early on by the creative mixing pot of Kreuzberg. His academic refinement at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste put him under the tutelage of Hans Jaenisch and later Hans Kuhn, fostering in him not only technical skill but also a penchant for artistic confrontation and renewal. Steiner’s formative years already glimmered with promise, shown by early encounters with American abstraction—his first expressive forays in oil and gouache appeared alongside figures like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke.

Central to his development was his sojourn in New York in the mid-60s, where the future pioneer of video art absorbed influences from Fluxus and Pop Art, moving among the likes of Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow. Steiner’s proximity to experimentalists such as Robert Motherwell, and his immersion in the worlds of Allan Kaprow (the „Father of Happening“) and contemporaneous performance artists, imparted a lasting taste for provocation and for extending painting into new, ephemeral realms. His American experience, coupled with his rejection of the draft for the U.S. military, steered him back to Berlin, forever changed and eager to ignite new conversations in art.

Perhaps nowhere is this legacy more palpable than in his founding of the Hotel Steiner in 1970, a Berlin hub compared in spirit to the legendary Chelsea Hotel. Here, through marathon debates and late-night gatherings, he forged links with the international avant-garde—Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and Ben Vautier among them. Crucially, these days saw Steiner’s decisive pivot from pure painting toward multimedia, performance, and the radical abandonment of medium hierarchies. His hunger for collaborative energy soon found a new home in the Studiogalerie (1974), where he offered coveted video equipment and a venue for emerging forms like Fluxus, Happening, and, critically, video art.

This new experiment not only served his own ambitions—such as the architectural video-works with Al Hansen and the live-action documentation of Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Ulay—but became a focal point for Berlin’s alternative scene. Few spaces in Germany at the time could rival the Studiogalerie in terms of impact or transgressive energy. Its activities bridged production, exhibition, and event—mirroring the innovative ferment found in venues like the Kölnischer Kunstverein under Wulf Herzogenrath, but wholly unique in its Berlin flavor. The legendary 36-hour “Hotel Room Event” (1979), organized by Steiner and Ben Vautier, entered the annals of performance art; such initiatives not only archived artistic process in real time, but established Berlin as a capital for new art media.

Steiner’s role as both facilitator and originator came to the fore with „Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst“ (1976, with Ulay)—the infamous performance that staged the “theft” of Spitzweg’s painting „Der arme Poet.“ Here, Steiner was not merely documenting history; he was making it, blending activism, performance, and video into a single, iconic episode. The resulting film found international resonance and confirmed him among the linchpins of the era’s avant-garde, cited in the same breath as Nam June Paik or Bill Viola for its conceptual sharpness.

In the 1980s, Steiner’s experimental drive ramped up. Utilizing Super-8 film, Copy Art, slides, and Minimal Art, he increasingly blurred the lines between abstract painting and electronic media. His famed “Painted Tapes”—hybrids of video image and painterly gesture—anticipate today’s conversation about intermediality and the aura of the artwork in reproducible form. Steiner’s exhibition “Color Works” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999, perhaps the most substantial solo show of his career, cemented his status as a pivotal figure in contemporary art. There, and in subsequent presentations like “Live to Tape” (2011/12), the Nationalgalerie honoured his dual legacy as both progenitor and documentarian of video and performing arts.

Comparing Mike Steiner to contemporaries like Marina Abramovi?, Joseph Beuys and Gary Hill is illuminating: while Abramovi? made the body a stage and Beuys transformed materials into ideology, Steiner’s gift lay in uniting the documentary impulse with painterly abstraction—always keeping space for irony, ambiguity, and the fleeting power of encounter. His archive, now largely residing at the Hamburger Bahnhof, stands alongside the collections of these movers, preserving some of the most vital actions, performances, and ephemeral works of his age.

Importantly, Mike Steiner was also a relentless collector. His passion for safeguarding video art is embodied in the Berlin Video collection and the far-reaching gifts to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Yet his last period saw a return to the intimacy of painting—eschewing spectacle, he delved into abstract color fields and textile works, demonstrating a full-circle journey from rebellious acts to meditative, tactile abstraction. This restless push for new forms and new venues—be it through late exhibitions at DNA Galerie (Berlin) or international showcases—suggests an oeuvre never content with easy answers.

What does Mike Steiner’s legacy mean today? The obvious answer is his pioneering synthesis of visual and performing arts: he stands as a connective figure, a “missing link” binding abstract painting, video installation, and performance in the pulse of contemporary arts Berlin. Yet on a subtler level, his work reminds us of the ongoing necessity to question, to play, and to resist closure. Fans and new audiences alike would do well to browse www.mike-steiner.de—the official artist page and archive—for further immersion in his life’s breadth and visual riches.

Take a deeper dive into Mike Steiner's archive, exhibitions and texts here

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