Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: A Pioneer of Video, Performance & Abstract Expression

Mike Steiner's path in contemporary art led from vibrant abstract painting to the very heart of video art. His work continues to influence Berlin's avant-garde and global art discourse.

What defines the unique pulse of contemporary art in Berlin? In the case of Mike Steiner, the answer lies in a fearless oscillation between disciplines, eras, and artistic self-questioning. Mike Steiner’s career is not only a vivid testament to the evolution of contemporary art but also an exploration of its boundaries—be it through painting, pioneering video art, or groundbreaking performance.

Fascinating throughout is how Mike Steiner acted as both creator and catalyst within the world of Contemporary Arts Berlin. His earliest public appearance as a seventeen-year-old painter in 1959 already hinted at an artistic restlessness—a desire to question forms and expectations. Over the next five decades, his oeuvre grew into a polyphonic archive of media experiments, conceptual ruptures, and radical collaborations, ultimately securing him a prominent place alongside luminaries like Nam June Paik, Marina Abramovi?, and Joseph Beuys.

But what, precisely, characterizes Steiner’s stylistic DNA? At first glance, his abstract paintings draw viewers into labyrinths of color and geometry. Yet even here, there is always a hint of movement, a vibration beneath the surface—a precursor to his later devotion to the moving image. By the early 1970s, growing doubts about painting’s adequacy as an expressive medium (as detailed on his official website) led him towards the emergent field of video art, fueled by exposure to Fluxus milieus and international exchange in New York and Berlin.

Key Phases and Artistic Milestones

Mike Steiner’s artistic journey is inextricably linked to the crucial platforms he created: the legendary Hotel Steiner in Berlin, his Studiogalerie, and the Video Gallery—each more than just a venue, but vibrant nodes of the contemporary art network. The Studio Gallery, modelled after Florence’s Studio Art/Tapes/22, became a magnetic field for cross-pollinating disciplines, nurturing interventionist artists such as Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Ulay and Marina Abramovi?. Steiner not only provided these figures with resources and exhibition space but often took up the camera himself—his eye focusing, framing, archiving the ephemeral pulse of performance art.

The pivotal action "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst," created with Ulay in 1976, exemplifies this spirit: an orchestrated art heist, a conceptual coup underscoring the reality-breaching ambitions of performance and video art. Such acts propelled Berlin into the vanguard of contemporary performance, aligning Steiner with the likes of Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture or Allan Kaprow’s happenings, but always with a distinctively Berlin edge—provocative, collaborative, experimental.

In the 1980s, Steiner’s experimentations deepened. The fusion of media—Super 8, photography, Copy Art—culminated in his signature "Painted Tapes": a virtuosic montage of video recordings and painterly interventions, blurring the boundaries between analog and digital, static and kinetic. The musical collaborations with Tangerine Dream, as in "Mojave Plan" (awarded at Toronto’s Video/Culture festival), extend Steiner’s vision of art as a multimedia, sonically-charged field—aligning him with other interdisciplinary contemporaries such as Bill Viola and Gary Hill.

Perhaps most emblematic of Steiner's enduring impact was his singular exhibition "Color Works" at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in 1999. This major show did not merely celebrate his contributions; it marked the confluence of his painterly past and his pioneering role in video art. The Hamburger Bahnhof, itself a monument to contemporary art’s limitless potential, now houses his vast collection—testifying to the lasting resonance of his artistic and curatorial labors.

Peering into Steiner’s Artistic Philosophy and Biography

Born in Allenstein in 1941, Mike Steiner was shaped by diverse influences—from the traditions of East Prussian nobility to the postwar ferment of Berlin. Encounters with such major contemporaries as Hans Jaenisch, Hans Kuhn, and later with the likes of Allan Kaprow and Lil Picard in New York, expanded his understanding of what contemporary art could be. His formative years in Kreuzberg, alongside figures like Georg Baselitz, are echoed in his restless search for innovation and his commitment to collectivity—qualities that define the Berlin art scene to this day.

Repeated sojourns in the US and extensive travels in Europe made Steiner a bridge between American Pop Art, Fluxus, and the nascent contemporary movement in Germany. His relentless innovation—seen, for example, in the Video Gallery, which anticipated the television gallery concepts of Gerry Schum—helped democratize access to Contemporary Arts Berlin, and ensured his status as a pioneer, not just as an artist but as a collector, archivist, and facilitator.

Even after a serious stroke in 2006, Steiner continued to work in his Berlin studio, eventually returning to abstract painting and textile works. While his later creations remain less widely known, they echo his lifelong themes: the interplay of surface and depth, chance and structure, personal vision and collective experience.

Why Mike Steiner Remains Vital for Contemporary Art

What makes Mike Steiner relevant today? For art connoisseurs and newcomers alike, his work is a masterclass in experimentation and artistic courage. Steiner’s ability to navigate the margins—between painting and performance, gallery and action, documentation and art—remains deeply instructive for a new generation exploring hybrid and multidisciplinary practices.

Moreover, his keen role as an archivist and networker ensures that the legacy of performing arts and video within the contemporary context in Berlin is not lost but continually reinterpreted. His archive, part of the Hamburger Bahnhof, is an untold treasure for historians, artists, and anyone curious about the seismic shifts in postwar art practice.

In sum, engaging with the work of Mike Steiner is to travel alongside one of Berlin’s great Artistic explorers, from abstract painting to multimedia installations, through the flux of ideas, images, and actions that still shape contemporary art. For further details on his life, major exhibitions, and a closer look into his archive, visit his official website at mike-steiner.de – Learn more about the visionary of contemporary art ????.

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