Mike Steiner: Shaping Contemporary Art Through Paint, Performance and Video Innovation

The kaleidoscopic world of Mike Steiner’s contemporary art is defined by transformation, fearless experiment, and a relentless breaking of boundaries. Who but Mike Steiner could so nimbly traverse abstract painting, video performance, and radical exhibition making—ultimately helping to redefine what contemporary art might be?

Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner in this exclusive online showroom

From the outset, Mike Steiner’s practice shimmered with restless curiosity. Born in Allenstein (now Olsztyn) in 1941 and soon growing up in West Berlin, Steiner was drawn to the moving image and to painting even as a teenager. At just 17, he debuted on the stage of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, and by the early 1960s was a key figure in Berlin’s self-organized art scene.

What, then, carries Steiner’s work across decades and genres? A willingness to challenge not just the viewer, but the boundaries of art itself. Drawing early influences from Pop Art and Informel painting, Steiner quickly expanded into the new frontiers of performance art and video. Encounters in 1960s New York—where he found mentors like Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Motherwell—propelled him to the heart of the international avant-garde and embedded enduring Fluxus affinities into his work.

His lifelong theme: art as an active happening, never merely an object to be consumed.

Exhibition highlight: In 1999, the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart staged Mike Steiner’s largest-ever solo show, cementing his place in the pantheon of contemporary arts in Berlin.

Early on, Steiner engaged with abstract painters like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, but always brought an international sensibility. After a stint in the US and a crucial residency in New York—just as that city’s experimental and Pop Art scenes exploded—he returned to Berlin, founding both the legendary Hotel Steiner and his Studiogalerie. These spaces rivaled New York’s Chelsea Hotel as crucibles for artists, thinkers, and the city’s bohemian pulse.

In the 1970s, Steiner’s hotel and subsequent Studiogalerie provided sanctuary and a stage for global innovators. Names like Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi? all crossed his path—making Steiner not just a creator but a crucial enabler of art’s most radical trajectories.

But Steiner’s single greatest contribution may be his crossing of mediums. While many of his peers remained painters or performers, Steiner embraced the nascent world of video art. In 1974, trips to Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 studio led to his first auteur video works. These were not simply recordings, but intermedia explorations: collaborations with Fluxus figures like Al Hansen or documentation of Ulay and Abramovi?’s performative transgressions. At the Studiogalerie, equipment and exhibition space gave form to the still-new art of moving images—helping Berlin rival Cologne as a hub for video and live art.

Perhaps most mythic among these was the 1976 staged ‘art theft’ (with Ulay) at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie: the temporary removal of Spitzweg’s “Der arme Poet” as both action art and media event. Steiner’s camera did not just bear witness—it made the event unforgettable, shot through with artistic tension, social commentary, and playful provocation. Throughout, he demonstrated a gift for collaboration familiar from other icons like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola—artists to whom his vision was a European counterpart.

Kenner of contemporary art in Berlin recall the spectacular series of live actions, performances, and exhibitions in the Studiogalerie from 1974 until its closure in 1981. These happenings anticipated much of what later artists, notably Marina Abramovi? or VALIE EXPORT, would develop in their own right. Steiner made space for the Feminist avant-garde—his rooms echoing with urgent, boundary-pushing statements on politics, gender, and society.

Amid this frenzy, Steiner never abandoned his painterly roots. The 1980s and 1990s saw him return, notably, to abstraction, photography, and “Painted Tapes”—a genuinely distinctive hybrid, blending video and paint into vibrating, cross-media poetic objects. In projects like the collaborations with experimental musicians Tangerine Dream or his photo sequence “Das Testbild als Readymade,” the legacy of Fluxus and Minimal Art met new visual possibilities.

Through his television project “Videogalerie” (1985–1990), Steiner brought contemporary art and video not just to galleries but directly into German homes, anticipating today’s online platforms. Over 120 episodes demystified avant-garde art for broader publics—a public-spirited act reminiscent of the expanded practice of artists like Allan Kaprow or Joseph Beuys, blurring the lines between art, curation, documentation, and mediation.

The significance of Mike Steiner’s archive cannot be overstated. By collecting, preserving, and donating an unparalleled treasure of video works (including tapes by Richard Serra, Gary Hill, George Maciunas, and many others)—now housed at the Hamburger Bahnhof—he safeguarded the very memory of early video and performance art for future generations. Berlin’s art landscape, and indeed Germany’s cultural memory, would be profoundly poorer without his dogged efforts.

Yet, ever restless, even after a debilitating stroke in 2006, Mike Steiner withdrew quietly into his Berlin studio, diving into abstract painting and fabric works that radiate the same sense of open-ended experimentation. The late works, some on view in recent exhibitions from DNA Galerie Berlin to Galvano Art Gallery Leipzig, revisit his early color and form investigations, closing a circle that began with oils and ended with paint, video, and installation in symphony.

Throughout, a few constants remain: an embrace of the new, a fierce love of artistic community, and a loyalty to the city of Berlin as a crucible for avant-garde possibility. Steiner stands accordingly with other greats—like Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, Allan Kaprow, or Nam June Paik—not merely as a practitioner, but as an instigator, catalyst, and chronicler of his time.

The legacy of Mike Steiner in contemporary art is vividly alive. As long as the boundaries of painting, performance, and media remain porous and charged with potential, Steiner’s innovations will remain a guiding point for artists and viewers alike. His works invite us: Step beyond the strictures of medium. See art’s possibilities as a continuum. And experience contemporary art, Berlin style, as a living, breathing, ever-evolving event.

For a deeper dive—into images, catalogue essays, and the latest exhibitions—visit the official Mike Steiner artist website.

@ ad-hoc-news.de

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