Mike Steiner: A Visionary of Contemporary Art and Video at the Intersection of Media

Anyone who has ever wandered through a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art cannot help but pause at the legacy of Mike Steiner. His work oscillates between color, movement, and the radical reimagining of the moving image. What happens when painting bursts its static frame and the video camera becomes a brush? Mike Steiner—artist, initiator, collector—dedicated his life to this experiment, consistently defying categorical limitations and changing the landscape for generations of contemporary German and international artists.

Discover contemporary art highlights by Mike Steiner—click for an immersive journey through his major works

From the earliest days of his career, Mike Steiner was a restless innovator. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, he spent his youth in West Berlin, exhibiting as a teenager at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. But it was the transatlantic pull that shaped him—studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts Berlin, followed by formative years in New York. There, amidst the ferment of Pop Art and the radical atmosphere cultivated by Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and Lil Picard, Steiner found a way to blur the boundaries of painting, performance, and moving images. This international network, similar to what Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik fostered, would fuel his approach to contemporary arts in Berlin and globally.

Steiner’s stylistic path is illustrated by key periods: a shift from abstract paintings and informal art to the immersive world of video. His early success with expressive painting soon gave way to skepticism about the limitations of the canvas. The tactile quality of paint—later reflected in his 'painted tapes'—became a vibrational field for experimentation, often echoing tendencies found within Gerhard Richter’s abstraction, yet always filtered through Steiner’s own multi-media sensibility.

This restless energy culminated with the founding of Berlin’s Hotel Steiner and, most significantly, the Studiogalerie in 1974—a crucible for performance and video. Here, Steiner not only created but also facilitated: his gallery lent out valuable video equipment and offered a platform for avant-garde experiments in performing arts. Through this, influential figures such as Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, and Jochen Gerz found a stage in Berlin. In a manner echoing international pioneers like Bill Viola or Richard Serra, Steiner documented and enabled some of the most important moments in contemporary art history.

The radical 1970s action, 'Irritation – There is a criminal touch in art' (1976), staged with Ulay, is legendary. Not simply content to witness art history—Steiner was its protagonist. His documentary eye, often behind the camera for ephemeral performances, preserved the fleeting, the marginal, the revolutionary. This commitment to archiving and contextualizing performance and video would later shape his extensive collection, eventually bestowed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and now a highlight of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

Steiner’s work in media feels always ahead of its time. From 1985 to 1990, his TV project 'Videogalerie' broadcasted over 120 episodes on video art, echoing the path forged by Gerry Schum's visionary Fernsehgalerie. These broadcasts did not merely document, but actively shaped the public and critical reception of video in the contemporary art canon—a feat comparable in impact to Nam June Paik’s playful yet profound mediatizations.

And yet, Mike Steiner was never content with one medium. His painted tapes—beautiful amalgamations of color and moving image layering—are among his most innovative contributions. The series, which includes works created alongside or inspired by musicians like Tangerine Dream, extends the painterly tradition into a synesthetic cosmos, blurring lines between audio-visual and tactile experience. This symbiosis of media channels resonates with the practices of Gary Hill and even the performative painting explorations of Yves Klein.

Abstract painting remained a constant undercurrent. After decades of exploration, Steiner’s late phase marked a return to the brush. Since 2000, his focus has been large-format abstraction, distinctive for its chromatic vitality, surface tension, and architectural interplay of form and space. These works—frequently exhibited in Berlin’s DNA Galerie and at events like 'Form, Farbe, Fläche'—demonstrate Steiner's enduring fascination with the elemental matrix of color. Connoisseurs draw parallels to the late works of contemporaries like Sean Scully, yet Steiner’s approach is unmistakably imbued with the sensibility of someone who has lived between the frames, both in painting and video.

As a collector and facilitator, Mike Steiner’s impact is equally profound. The growth of his video art collection, begun with seminal works by Reiner Ruthenbeck in the 1970s and encompassing pieces by Ulay, Abramovi?, Richard Serra, and Allan Kaprow, underlines Steiner’s role as both a chronicler and a catalyst. Exhibitions such as the celebrated 1999 solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof—'COLOR WORKS 1995-1998'—stand as a testament to his reputation among the leading lights of contemporary arts in Berlin and internationally.

Fascinating too is his engagement with the process of mediation and documentation. Through lectures at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, juror roles for the DAAD’s renowned Berliner Künstlerprogramm, and symposia participation, Steiner influenced the next wave of German video and performing artists. His ability to think across genres and to fuse theory with praxis links him to the experimental courage of figures like Wolf Vostell and Daniel Spoerri.

Looking back, what makes the artistic legacy of Mike Steiner so enduring? At its core: a radical openness. Each medium—whether the brushstroke, the camera lens, or the performative happening—became a space for inquiry, disruption, and connection. Steiner’s work constantly asked, how can art reflect and simultaneously create the new realities of its time? For Berlin and the broader contemporary art world, these questions remain as urgent as ever.

To this day, visitors can experience Steiner’s multifaceted heritage in the Hamburger Bahnhof, where parts of his vast video collection and his own art installations are conserved and celebrated. His site, Find in-depth materials on Mike Steiner’s life, exhibitions, and key works here ????, remains a valuable source for art enthusiasts and scholars alike.

Ultimately, to engage with Mike Steiner’s oeuvre is to step into an alive, ever-shifting dialogue—a conversation between disciplines, times, and visions. His legacy urges us not just to observe art but to participate in its evolution. This, perhaps more than anything, marks his singular place in the landscape of contemporary art.

@ ad-hoc-news.de

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