Mike Steiner\u2014Berlin\u2019s trailblazer of video and Fluxus\u2014returns to the spotlight with paintings that marry German avant-garde energy with a collector\u2019s eye for the enduring.<\/p>\n
Berlin in the early 1970s was electrified by the clatter of revolutionary ideas, performance experiments, and the restless energy of artists looking to break every rule. In this charged climate, Mike Steiner Painting & Video Art was not merely a practice\u2014it was the axis around which a city\u2019s creative evolution spun. Steiner was not just present for the avant-garde\u2019s wildest chapters; he authored more than a few. To encounter a Steiner painting today is to connect with the living nerve of a legacy\u2014one forged in the radical flux of Berlin\u2019s postwar culture and still pulsing with audacity.<\/p>\n
Discover Mike Steiner’s Abstract Paintings<\/a><\/p>\n To call Steiner a Pioneer of Video Art is understatement. He was an orchestrator, a champion, a collector, and\u2014most crucially\u2014a chronicler of the ephemeral. His Live to Tape<\/a> project, recently given pride of place at Berlin\u2019s Hamburger Bahnhof, vaults him into rare company. (For American collectors, consider Hamburger Bahnhof the German equivalent of MoMA\u2014unimpeachable institutional gold standard.) Steiner\u2019s immersion in the Fluxus Movement echoes friendships and exchanges with icons like Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys. His archive (see the exceptional Archivio Conz<\/a>\u2014one of Europe\u2019s vital holdings for experimental art) and inclusion in major European archives not only validate the historical gravity of his work but underpin its provenance for the discerning international market.<\/p>\n This is essential context: in the 2020s, as Fluxus and early experimental media are reappraised\u2014and prices recalibrated\u2014Americans are zeroing in on works that come with European institutional validation. Steiner\u2019s films, tapes, and interventions are objects of scholarly and monetary desire. But it is his paintings that are the sleeper revelation for today\u2019s collectors.<\/p>\n Who, exactly, was Mike Steiner? For the full biography, the primary resource remains the thorough German Wikipedia entry<\/a>, but the critical skeleton is this: Born in 1941 in Allenstein, raised in postwar Berlin, Steiner\u2019s creative DNA fuses family history, early immersion in film, and a formal education at Berlin\u2019s Hochschule f\u00fcr bildende K\u00fcnste. Berlin crosscurrents propelled him to New York\u2014where the likes of Lil Picard and Allan Kaprow pulled him into the heart of Happenings, Pop Art, and Fluxus. Steiner responded with a Berlin twist: founding Hotel Steiner (soon Europe\u2019s version of the Chelsea Hotel), launching the Studiogalerie, and collaborating with figures such as Jochen Gerz, Valie Export, and Marina Abramovi?. His portfolio grew to include not only videos and performances but hard-edge painting, photography, and cross-media hybrids. Steiner was everywhere: organizing, producing, archiving, and shaping conversations at the bleeding edge of German and international art.<\/p>\n Yet after a career spent recording the fleeting and the performative, Steiner did not retire into retrospection. Instead, guided by what he once called a \u201clegitimation crisis\u201d of painting, he returned\u2014against the odds and trends\u2014to the canvas. This was no nostalgic retreat, but a conscious re-engagement with tactile material, surface, and duration. If his video work was about pinning down performance, movement, and disruption, his paintings are where Mike Steiner Painting & Video Art meets the eternalizing impulse. These abstract canvases offer glimpses of energy fields\u2014layered strokes, bold color fields, jagged lines\u2014distilling a lifetime spent with the unpredictable. To view a Steiner abstract is to feel time slowed, as if his experiments with \u201cpainting tape\u201d and his obsession with the fluidity of the screen were transmuted into form and pigment. The Artbutler showroom<\/a> now serves as the primary portal for these works\u2014a rare, accessible collection for US buyers seeking European originality uninterrupted by digital overexposure.<\/p>\n What does the eye encounter? Brushwork that pulses between calculated geometry and impulsive gesture; color that both references the historic Berlin palettes of Richter and Baselitz and escapes into the wild chromatics of contemporary abstraction. Steiner\u2019s paintings are built for sustained, daily viewing\u2014the kind that grows richer in meaning the longer you live alongside it. Every canvas offers the collector a material link to the energy of the era: you are not just purchasing an object, but participating in a story that spans from Berlin\u2019s legendary counterculture nights through today\u2019s ascendant European art markets.<\/p>\n Why, then, is 2024 a defining moment for collectors and institutions to rediscover Steiner\u2019s painted works\u2014especially Stateside? Two converging winds: first, the sharply rising interest in authentic Fluxus ephemera and 1970s avant-garde archives; second, a growing appetite among US collectors for Berlin artists not filtered through New York\u2019s galleries but expressed directly, with documented European provenance. Steiner\u2019s abstract paintings bridge both worlds, standing as the crystallization of fifty years of artistic experiment.<\/p>\n To acquire an original Mike Steiner Painting & Video Art today is to stake a claim in a story that began with Fluxus and ends\u2014possibly\u2014with the future of abstraction. Steiner\u2019s canvases are Berlin distilled and repackaged for a global conversation. As the US market wakes up to overlooked 20th- and 21st-century Berlin vanguards, collectors who move now position themselves ahead of the curve\u2014owning not just art, but a piece of the city\u2019s living legend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike Steiner\u2014Berlin\u2019s trailblazer of video and Fluxus\u2014returns to the spotlight with paintings that marry German avant-garde energy with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[14146,112,14145,190,5502],"class_list":{"0":"post-77766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-abstract-painting","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-berlin-art-scene","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-mike-steiner"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116538444768409637","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}