Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Bridging Painting, Video, and Avant-Garde Berlin

What happens when painting collides with the electric pulse of video art? Mike Steiner, a renowned figure of contemporary art, spent his career redefining the boundaries between media, genres, and artistic circles. His restless curiosity turned him into a pioneer—an artist who didn’t just ride the wave of change, but often generated it in Berlin’s vibrant cultural waters.

Discover contemporary works by Mike Steiner here – full exhibition experience online

Mike Steiner’s artistic journey began in post-war Germany and quickly led him through the epicenters of contemporary art—Berlin, New York, Florence. From early paintings exhibited as a teenager at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959, over immersive forays into abstract painting and informel, to ground-breaking innovations in video art and experimental installations, his oeuvre maps the evolution of artistic media in the latter 20th century.

Steiner’s early works were noticeably influenced by the post-war energy swirling around Berlin’s Kreuzberg. But it was his flights to New York in the 1960s—guided by connections to Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and the shadow of Pop Art and Fluxus—that ignited his passion for multimedia. Here, in dialogue with Robert Motherwell and Al Hansen, Steiner found the inspiration to move beyond the canvas, embracing time, movement, and spatial experience.

Back in Berlin, his artistic commitment deepened with the founding of the legendary Hotel Steiner and later, the Studiogalerie. Both became touchstones for the international avant-garde, a crossroads not only for German artists like Joseph Beuys and Karl Horst Hödicke, but also for a global network of performers and visionaries. The Studiogalerie’s ethos—part production space, part exhibition venue, part performance laboratory—mirrored Steiner’s desire to open Berlin to the then-nascent energies of video art and performance.

His own works from this time shimmer with a restless spirit of experimentation: gestural abstract paintings, evocative installations, and above all, pioneering forays into video. By the early 1970s, Steiner was questioning the sufficiency of painting in an era hungry for new meanings and forms. Inspired by his time at Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 studio, he began collaborating with figures such as Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, and Valie Export. Together, they turned the video camera into both witness and participant—capturing fleeting performances, political gestures, and the ephemeral drama of contemporary existence. One infamous case: “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst (1976)” where Ulay staged the temporary theft of a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie, filmed and orchestrated by Steiner’s Studiogalerie.

Few figures so tirelessly documented and collected the emerging medium. His voracious collecting began with Reiner Ruthenbeck’s tapes, leading towards what would become an archive of contemporary video featuring Ulay, Abramovi?, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Jochen Gerz, and Gary Hill. Eventually, the Berlin Video and Mike Steiner Collection became essential sources on the history of European and American video art, culminating in his landmark donation to the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999—a major milestone for institutional collections in Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Steiner’s artistic journey was not static. In the 1980s, after reaching the zenith of his video and performance engagement, he moved again between media—photography, Super-8 film, Copy-Art, Minimal Art, Hard Edge painting and, most pointedly, the so-called Painted Tapes. These were an audacious synthesis of painted surface and videotaped image, standing out as vivid examples of performative abstraction. His later years saw a heartfelt return to painting—now fully abstract, luminous, and gestural, as brought to the fore in his major solo exhibition “Color Works” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999. Exhibitions from Berlin’s Galerie Dittmar to San Francisco’s Brookings Gallery and Leipzig’s Galvano Art Gallery revealed a mature, playful engagement with color and form.

How does Steiner’s legacy compare within the pantheon of contemporary greats? There are echoes of Nam June Paik’s invention, the boundary-pushing installations of Richard Serra, Marina Abramovi?’s performance radicalism, and even the color explorations of Gerhard Richter. Yet, the singular energy of Steiner lies in his simultaneous embrace of the role of artist, curator, documentarian, and facilitator—a deeply social approach to artistic practice rooted in the bohemian spirit of 20th-century Berlin.

His inquisitive mind fostered a sense of openness rare in any era: he did not simply create, but connected—and archived—the fleeting beauty of contemporary art. The Video Gallery TV-format he devised in the 1980s, for instance, anticipated today’s hybrid cultural mediation between screen and gallery, laying groundwork for digital archives and new viewing experiences.

Biographically, Mike Steiner was always in flux. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, his journey took him from the post-war shadows of East Prussia into a West Berlin bursting with new artistic life. Early on, he chose painting, only to leap into the unknown of moving images, all while building collectives, staging happenings, and collaborating with artists drawn from every corner of the world. By his final years, his work turned meditative—abstract paintings and textile pieces quietly reflecting on memory, time, and the potential for reinvention.

Yet, if there is a red thread in Steiner’s multi-layered career, it is this: a commitment to challenging artistic dogmas, to cultivating the new, and most of all, to holding open the doors to unexpected encounters between art forms and artists. The scope of his influence—encompassing generations of artists, photographers, and performance makers in Contemporary Arts Berlin and far beyond—is visible today in the ongoing reappraisal of his collection and artworks.

What makes Steiner’s work so compelling now is precisely its refusal to stand still. There is a continuous flow—a dialogue between past and future, between painting and moving image, between individual expression and collective enterprise. Even now, years after his passing in 2012, his innovative spirit resonates, echoing through exhibitions and the hallowed halls of the Hamburger Bahnhof.

For anyone keen to rediscover the overlooked energies of late modern art, a deep dive into the works and archive of Mike Steiner is nothing less than essential. Let yourself be pulled in: explore painted tapes, revisit iconic performances, or lose yourself in the sensuous intensity of his abstract paintings. For further insights, rare images, and archival gems, the official Mike Steiner website offers a gateway to his world of contemporary art—the journey is well worth it.

@ ad-hoc-news.de

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