Mike Steiner and the Pulse of Contemporary Art: Visionary between Abstraction and Video

Mike Steiner redefined contemporary art by bridging abstract painting, performance, and pioneering video art. Discover how his restless innovation shaped Berlin’s creative future and inspired generations.

How do you capture the spirit of contemporary art in a single life’s work? Mike Steiner’s name echoes with radical curiosity and relentless invention—his journey through abstraction, performance, and video set the tone for artistic experimentation in postwar Berlin. If you seek what makes art pulse with life, Steiner’s multifaceted oeuvre is a key, unlocking new perceptions of the possible.

Mike Steiner’s early artistic steps began not with a camera but with brushes and canvases. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, and raised in war-shaken Berlin, he presented his first painting—already marked by informel energy—at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1959 when he was just 17. Steiner’s initial foray was deeply rooted in abstract painting, standing alongside figures such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. These foundational years, spent at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, reveal a restless search: a drive to interrogate, to be at the edge of painterly expression.

What, then, redirects a young abstract painter’s path onto the wild terrain of video and performance? The answer unfolds in the 1960s, as Steiner’s horizons broadened through pivotal travels to New York. There, in a crucible of Fluxus, Pop Art, and avant-garde happenings, he forged connections with icons like Allan Kaprow—one of the inventors of the happening—Al Hansen, and the legendary art chronicler Lil Picard. The New York art world of the era was electric: Steiner absorbed the feverish questioning of medium and genre that defined the likes of Andy Warhol and Robert Motherwell, frequent presences in his circle. This immersion in the international avant-garde injected a sense of risk and process into Steiner’s practice, themes that would soon define his contribution to Contemporary Arts Berlin.

It was the return to Berlin, however, that catalyzed his radical turn. In 1970, at Albrecht-Achilles-Strasse, Steiner opened the Hotel Steiner: a bohemian refuge and creative hub likened to New York's Chelsea Hotel. Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and visiting American artists found both accommodation and artistic kinship in its rooms. It was here the seeds for his next revolution—intermedia and video—took root. By 1974, having recognized the limitations and “crisis of legitimation” in abstract painting, Steiner founded the Studiogalerie, Berlin’s first independent platform truly devoted to video art and performance.

The Studiogalerie soon became the beating heart of Berlin’s experimental spirit. In Steiner’s vision, performance art—particularly touchstones of the feminist avant-garde like Marina Abramovi? and Valie Export—was not enough unless it was documented, extended, made perpetual through video. His own technical innovation was to merge the fleeting intensity of performance with the reproducibility and democratizing reach of video. A landmark action, Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst (1976) with Ulay, shattered boundaries: a staged “art theft” of Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet, scrutinized through the lens of ethics, institutions, and the body politic. The documentation became a classic of art history, cementing Steiner’s role as both catalyst and chronicler.

What set Mike Steiner apart from contemporaries—iconoclasts such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, or Richard Serra—was his commitment to cross-pollination of mediums and communities. While Paik pushed television and video into poetic territory, and Abramovi? tested the limits of endurance on stage, Steiner’s genius lay in creating spaces for dialogue: both physical (his hotel, gallery) and conceptual (his art tapes, his archives). Berlin’s Contemporary Art scene owes much of its dynamism to Steiner’s open doors and open mind.

Throughout the 1980s, Steiner’s experimentation knew no boundaries. He alternated between Super-8 film, photography, copy art, and audio-visual installations. His celebrated Painted Tapes series, for example, wove together video and painting—a kind of “electronic continuation” of abstraction, where color fields shimmer as much on the screen as they do on the canvas. At the same time, Steiner’s commitment to archiving and distributing video art was unmatched: his television program Die Videogalerie (1985–1990) brought new media and experimental artists such as Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Gary Hill to a broader German audience.

The size and significance of Mike Steiner’s own collection, ultimately bequeathed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and now part of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, cannot be overstated. It houses early and canonical works by Ulay, Abramovi?, Valie Export, Allan Kaprow, and more—forming a living archive of artistic vanguard, much of which featured in his major 1999 solo exhibition. The show COLOR WORKS (Hamburger Bahnhof) paid particular tribute to Steiner’s lifelong commitment to process and transgression in contemporary practice.

Equally compelling is the late phase of Steiner’s career. After a stroke in 2006, he retreated into quiet studio work, but, paradoxically, his final years display the calm assuredness only a life of artistic risk can bring. He turned again to abstract paintings—now radiant and meditative, echoing his beginnings yet filtered through decades of technical dialogue and media-mixing. From his early days to his late fabric works, a spine of experimentation unites every phase.

Steiner’s biographical story is one of restless generosity: as teacher, curator, juror (not least for the acclaimed DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program), and artist, he aimed always to expand the conditions for art to exist, to be seen, to move people. His philosophy radiates from his relentless boundary-testing and the emotional resonance of his work: a conviction that contemporary art is never static, but a living conversation—across time, across the room, across the image plane.

Fascinatingly, the influence of Mike Steiner persists in today’s generation of installation artists and time-based media practitioners. The global renown of the Hamburger Bahnhof, as well as Berlin’s reputation as a laboratory for new forms, bear traces of Steiner’s foundational role—the hotelier as host, catalyst, and documentarian. If names like Bill Viola, Marina Abramovi?, or even the iconic Fluxus pioneers are luminous on the world stage, it is impossible to overlook how Steiner’s infrastructure, encouragement, and collecting practices have seeded this luminescence in Berlin’s fertile soil.

Why, then, return to Steiner’s works? Because they reward slowing down, seeing with new eyes, appreciating the unfinished and the transitional—the foundation of both abstract painting and video installation in today’s art world. His tension between thought and feeling, duration and image, is as poignant now as at the moment of creation.

Those seeking deeper insight into Mike Steiner’s world—its archives, its radiant abstractions, its pivotal role in Berlin’s contemporary arts scene—will find rich material on the official Mike Steiner website. The journey is well worth it—for historians, artists, and art lovers alike.

@ ad-hoc-news.de