Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: A Visionary’s Impact on Berlin's Avant-Garde

Mike Steiner revolutionized contemporary art in Berlin—his radical works, innovative exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof, and pioneering multimedia approaches continue to shape today’s avant-garde.

Contemporary art finds few figures as restlessly inventive as Mike Steiner. Standing at the crossroad of painting and multimedia, Steiner’s legacy in Berlin’s art scene raises a compelling question: what happens when the boundaries between the still image and the moving image dissolve? Steiner’s art, steeped in experimentation and risk, draws viewers into layered realms—visual, conceptual, and tactile—where contemporary artistic language is ceaselessly redefined.

Mike Steiner’s journey as a key architect of Contemporary Arts Berlin began early. Born in 1941 in Allenstein and moving shortly thereafter to the culturally vital West Berlin, he first stepped into the artistic limelight at just 17 with a painting at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Even at this nascent stage, Steiner displayed an acute awareness for the pulse of avant-garde currents—a sensibility that would soon propel him towards international acclaim.

His early years were marked by studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, which coincided with his first substantial brushes with informel painting. Steiner’s formative connections with masters such as Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn catalyzed his dedication to artistic freedom—a motif running throughout his later work.

But the real ignition came from his encounters abroad. A pivotal moment unfolded in New York in the mid-1960s, facilitated by a Ford Foundation scholarship. Immersed in the thriving milieus of Fluxus and Pop Art, and in direct dialog with artists like Lil Picard, Al Hansen, Allen Kaprow and Robert Motherwell, Steiner absorbed the ferment of experimental energy. The city’s ceaseless reinvention proved formative—his own painting leaned more towards abstraction, his eye drawn increasingly to the possibilities of new media.

The late 1960s and early 1970s marked a major transition. After returning to Berlin, he became an instigator, not just creator. In 1970, Steiner opened Hotel Steiner, quickly mythologized as the Berlin outpost reminiscent of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Here, in the buzzing heart of West Berlin, boundary-defying artists like Joseph Beuys and Arthur Köpcke gathered amid an atmosphere that brimmed with dialog, collaboration and playful anarchy—a perfect incubator for contemporary art.

This environment bore rich fruit. It’s in the vibrant crosscurrents of Hotel Steiner that Mike Steiner began probing video’s potential, inspired anew by his experiences in the United States. By 1974, his pivotal Studiogalerie was established—a crucible for experimentation with video, performance art, and action-based practices. It operated on three explosive fronts: as a video art production site, as a stage for the radical performing arts, and as one of Berlin’s first truly independent hubs for experimental exhibition-making. He offered not just his support, but also essential production tools, opening the door for artists such as Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and notably, Marina Abramovi?, to stage performances that have since become touchstones of contemporary art history.

Mike Steiner’s role as a performing arts impresario reached an audacious climax in 1976 with “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” a notorious performance involving Ulay and the dramatic, performative 'theft' of a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie. Here, Steiner was both instigator and documentarian—the act itself, its video documentation, and its afterlife in critical debate cementing his place as a singular bridge between creation, curation, and preservation.

The embrace of new media flourished with his unique 'painted tapes'. These works, seamlessly infusing video art with elements of painting, exist as rare hybridizations in the canon—methods not unlike Bruce Nauman’s or Nam June Paik’s, but with a painter’s sensitivity to color, surface, and duration. Steiner’s relentless traversal of boundaries set him apart even amid conceptual giants like Bill Viola and Gary Hill, who later would also feature in his formidable art video collection.

The exhibition “COLOR WORKS” at Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999 was, fittingly, a crowning moment. This monumental show reframed Steiner’s oeuvre, revealing not only his pioneering video works but also a body of abstract paintings that vibrate with the same investigatory zeal as his moving images. It was here that the singular thread uniting his large-scale canvases, multimedia installations, and methodical yet poetic documentations became unmistakable: Steiner’s art is always about movement, whether of the hand, the camera, or the mind.

In his later years, with abstraction ever more at the fore, Steiner’s color fields became denser, more intense—a distillation of decades spent negotiating the visual cosmos from every possible vantage. These works, together with his textile art and photo cycles like “Das Testbild als Readymade”, extended his restless inquiry into the reception of images, the psychology of seeing, and the boundaries of the artwork itself.

Steiner’s biography underlines what connoisseurs of contemporary art often seek: unwavering experimentalism paired with an acute sense of context. Beyond his creative production, he was a tireless collector and archivist. Starting with the seminal acquisition of Reiner Ruthenbeck’s video in 1974, Steiner’s personal collection grew into one of Europe’s most vital repositories of video and performance art—an archive whose core holdings are now entrusted to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and housed at Hamburger Bahnhof.

This expansive archive not only preserves the ephemeral but ensures that the radical artistic sparks ignited in Berlin’s alternative spaces live on. Steiner’s studio, collections, and lasting networks—often echoed today in the work of figures like Marina Abramovi? or Richard Serra—remain a foundational layer within Berlin’s creative infrastructure, inspiring generations traversing new ground in art, technology, and performance.

Interwoven with the fabric of Contemporary Arts Berlin, Mike Steiner’s legacy reverberates beyond the sum of his exhibitions, videos, and abstract canvases. Here was an artist who questioned every genre limit, who understood the museum as a living laboratory, and who—through both radical gestures and everyday support for fellow creators—ensured that the new, the unknown, and the unrepeatable had a home. It is fascinating how his projects anticipated the hybrid art installations of today, not unlike those of Joseph Beuys or Nam June Paik, defining a bridge from postwar avant-garde into the digital future.

Why does Mike Steiner matter now, in an era awash with images? Because his oeuvre—be it a vivid painting, a flickering videotape, or the archive as Gesamtkunstwerk—insists on presence, on questioning, on the ceaseless urge to connect. Those who wish to understand the pulse of Berlin’s contemporary art scene, or the history of multimedia as an art form, cannot overlook his restless, generous, and prodigious contributions.

For deeper insights, selected works, and the full scope of Mike Steiner’s artistic vibrancy, a journey through his official website is highly recommended. Let yourself be challenged and captivated—there are few artists whose pursuit of new forms forges so direct a connection to the questions of art today.