Mike Steiner: A Visionary Pioneer of Contemporary Art and Video Innovation

Mike Steiner transformed the landscape of contemporary art, bridging painting and performance with groundbreaking video works. Discover his unique legacy in Berlin and beyond.

To encounter the work of Mike Steiner is to step into a world where boundaries between painting, performance, and moving image dissolve into a dynamic flux. How does one redefine the limits of contemporary art when the medium itself is in question? Mike Steiner’s multifaceted oeuvre comes alive through his relentless curiosity: each canvas, video, and installation breathes the pulse of experimentation. What is most fascinating about Steiner’s work is not just its historical significance, but its lasting presence in Berlin’s creative DNA, especially visible in his connections to sites like the Hamburger Bahnhof and the city’s vibrant Contemporary Arts Berlin scene.

Mike Steiner (b. 1941–d. 2012), a German artist hailing from Allenstein, began his artistic journey in West-Berlin. Notably, Steiner's career blossomed across multiple art forms: from abstract paintings in the late 1950s, through painterly dialogues with Pop Art and Informalism, up to his pivotal role as a European video art pioneer. Throughout, Steiner fostered an unbroken thread—his drive for artistic innovation and a keen engagement with the evolving language of contemporary art.

His earliest acclaim came with large-scale paintings, such as the “Stillleben mit Krug” (1958), unveiled publicly when he was just 17 at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Steiner’s formal training took him to the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, where his engagement with color, form, and process was shaped under mentors like Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn. From these academic beginnings, his path branched decisively towards New York in the mid-1960s—an immersion in the avant-garde that deeply influenced his method and outlook.

In New York, Steiner mingled with Fluxus and Pop Art artists—Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and frequented the atelier of Robert Motherwell. These formative years exposed Steiner to the radical practices of Happenings and experimental film. Upon his return to Berlin, and influenced by Allan Kaprow’s invitation to Florence’s legendary Art/Tapes/22, Steiner made a crucial transition from painting to video art. This move echoed the global trajectory of artists like Nam June Paik, yet Steiner’s German roots and Berlin activism lent his contribution a particular urgency and theoretical resolve.

Arguably, Steiner’s most influential achievement was the creation of the Studiogalerie (founded 1974), Berlin’s first independent forum for video and performance arts. Here, he provided a critical arena for the city’s creative vanguard, welcoming international figures such as Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Carolee Schneemann, and Valie Export—names that today define the era’s experimental spirit. This was not simply a gallery: it was an incubator of artistic risk, where video, installation, and performance melted into each other and the concept of contemporary arts in Berlin shifted profoundly.

The transformation of Hotel Steiner into an art hotel, reminiscent of New York's Chelsea Hotel, cemented Steiner’s importance as a facilitator. Josef Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and other luminaries gathered in Berlin, drawn to the creative ferment — not merely artists, but witnesses and shapers of transformation. It is here that one sees echoes of other artist-driven hubs like Andy Warhol’s Factory, and yet, Steiner’s space was notably democratic and experimental, more laboratory than salon.

Steiner’s collaboration with Ulay in the infamous 1976 performance "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" (the simulated art theft of Spitzweg’s “Armer Poet” from the Neue Nationalgalerie) went far beyond spectacle. The event’s lasting impact lay in its critique of institutional authority and the art world’s commodification—themes Steiner further developed in dozens of video works and installations. By documenting actions such as Marina Abramovi?’s “Freeing the Body” or Valie Export’s performances, Steiner cemented his role as both protagonist and chronicler of the era’s radical energy.

Above all, Steiner’s oeuvre testifies to interdisciplinary curiosity. He worked in Super-8 film, photography, copy art, minimal and hard-edge styles, always questioning and fusing genres. His late-career “Painted Tapes” series, a hybrid of video and painting, stand as eloquent proof of his refusal to settle for one mode of expression. These works, like those of comparative contemporaries such as Bill Viola or Gary Hill, blur the line between traditional art forms and electronic media, but are distinctly informed by Steiner’s personal, painterly touch and the raw experimentation of Berlin’s postwar years.

Steiner’s legacy is inextricably linked to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: his videos, paintings, and art installations, notably celebrated in the museum’s 1999 major solo exhibition "Color Works," have found a lasting institutional home. The exhibition recognized Steiner not only as an originator but as a connector, whose “Sammlung Mike Steiner” (video and performance archive) is an invaluable chronicle of twentieth-century avant-garde.

Throughout his four-decade career, Steiner’s role as artist, curator, and promoter shaped Berlin into an epicenter for contemporary art and performing arts. His work, documented meticulously on www.mike-steiner.de, spans exhibitions from the early 1960s through his late focus on abstract paintings and textile works. His restless energy fuelled both a personal investigation and a structural transformation in the European contemporary arts scene.

What distinguishes Mike Steiner from peers such as Joseph Beuys or Marina Abramovi? is his seamless merging of artistic innovation and institutional memory. Not only did he experiment at the edge of abstraction, he also preserved, documented, and disseminated the often ephemeral practices of Fluxus and performance through his vast collection and television programs. Titles like “Videogalerie” (the first German weekly television broadcast focused on video art, 1985–1990) reveal how Steiner anticipated today’s interconnected, multimedia-driven art world.

Towards the end of his career, despite a stroke in 2006 and subsequent withdrawal from public life, Steiner remained a productive force. Transitioning back to painting and even textile arts, his late works convey a distilled sense of color and abstraction, both a return to his roots and a synthesis of decades of technical exploration. Today, many of his works remain underexposed, for much of his video archive is awaiting digitization. Nevertheless, the institutional and artistic seeds planted by Steiner continue to nurture generations of artists and audiences alike.

The profound relevance of Mike Steiner’s art today? It lies in the way his restless probing, his love of dialogue and experimentation, and his tenacious advocacy for media-crossing creativity continue to echo in contemporary practices worldwide. For anyone passionate about abstract paintings, video art, or the entire spectrum of contemporary arts in Berlin, exploring Mike Steiner’s life’s work opens doors to new understandings and unexpected connections.

For in-depth documentation, vibrant images, and further background on Mike Steiner’s exhibitions, archive, and current reception, a visit to his official site www.mike-steiner.de is highly recommended—there awaits a world where past and present, paint and video, idea and action, continually converge.