Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: Fluxus, Video Innovation and Berlin's Avant-Garde Legacy

Mike Steiner stands as a visionary of contemporary art, blending video, painting and performance into a unique oeuvre. Discover how his pioneering spirit shaped the artistic landscape of Berlin and beyond.

How does one delineate the boundaries between painting and moving image, between individual creation and collective experience? In contemporary art, few names trigger such fundamental questions as Mike Steiner. With an oeuvre bridging rigorous abstraction and radical experiment, his multifaceted body of work – spanning painting, video, performance and installation – reveals not only the evolution of an artist, but the very ferment of Berlin’s avant-garde.

Mike Steiner’s trajectory reads like a blueprint for artistic curiosity. Born Klaus-Michel Steiner in Allenstein (today’s Olsztyn), 1941, and later deeply rooted in Berlin, he displayed an early penchant for both film and painting — passions that would soon coalesce into groundbreaking contributions to contemporary arts Berlin. By age 17, Steiner had already debuted at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. But it would be the city’s postwar currents and his academic sojourn at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin that accelerated his leap into the heart of experimental art.

His early paintings, merging informel tendencies and expressive abstraction, quickly found favor in artistic circles: exhibitions in Berlin, Wolfsburg, and appearances at major European showcases (Geneva, Milan, Paris) soon followed. His commitment to painting was never static; even then, one senses a restlessness — a search for new forms, new visual vocabularies. While working and teaching in Berlin throughout the 1960s, encounters with Pop Art and the international avant-garde seeded a lifelong engagement with flux and transformation.

Steiner’s crucial sojourn in New York during the mid-1960s exposed him to the galvanic energies of Fluxus, Happenings, and experimental film. Under the mentorship of luminaries such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen, and frequenting the circles of Robert Motherwell and figures like Georg Baselitz, Steiner became attuned to a porous, multidisciplinary approach. According to his biography, these experiences catalyzed his first video works in the early 1970s, developed with friends from the Fluxus movement. He would soon bring this restless spirit to Berlin, igniting a transformation in the city’s art scene.

It was in 1970 that Steiner opened the legendary Hotel Steiner off Kurfürstendamm – an epicenter for both international and German artists akin to the creative vibrancy of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke were among the many who found in Steiner’s spaces a haven for radical dialogue. Around this period, two projects became synonymous with his vision: the Studiogalerie and his ever-growing video art collection.

The Studiogalerie, founded in 1974, was both laboratory and launchpad for video art and performance in Berlin. Steiner’s decision to provide expensive video equipment to emerging artists – inspired by Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 studio – democratized new media practices in Germany. More than a mere gallerist, he became an instigator. He aided international avant-garde figures such as VALIE EXPORT, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovi? in realizing cutting-edge performances and installations: not only showcasing their work but also preserving fleeting moments via video documentation. Notably, his camera immortalized Abramovi?’s visceral "Freeing the Body" (1976), a historic moment in the evolution of performing arts.

Yet Steiner never abandoned painting or material experiment. From Super-8 film and photography to copy art, slide series and hard-edge abstractions, his oeuvre oscillates between media with ease. His later work, especially the "Painted Tapes" series, is emblematic of this hybridity: a synesthetic fusion of abstract painting and video rhythm, these works blur the boundaries between color and sound, image and motion.

Steiner’s most sensational performance contribution was undoubtedly the orchestrated 1976 "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" with Ulay, involving the theft of a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie — a conceptual provocation reverberating with echoes of Dada and Fluxus. The episode not only upended the expectations of the art establishment, it also cemented Steiner’s position as a chronicler and participant in the canon of performance art. Comparably, his role in archiving and transmitting these experiments echoes the work of contemporaries like Gerry Schum or, internationally, Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, bridging time-based media with the dynamism of installation and performance.

In the 1980s, Steiner’s reach expanded even further with his innovative TV project, Videogalerie (1985–1990). Broadcasting over 120 programmes on video art, he brought the genre into German living rooms, creating vital documentation in an era before digital ubiquity. This, along with his curatorial involvement at the legendary ART Basel and the Biennale di Venezia, underlined his significance as both catalyst and custodian for contemporary video and performing arts.

One particular highlight in the painter's journey was his major retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in 1999, titled "Color Works." Here, Steiner’s achievements as a bridge builder between painting and video, innovation and tradition, were celebrated with due scale. His donated video art collection – featuring early tapes by Ulay, Abramovi?, VALIE EXPORT, Jochen Gerz, Richard Serra, Bill Viola, Gary Hill and others – remains a cornerstone for research and exhibition in Berlin. Few artists can claim such a dual importance as creator and archivist.

In the last chapters of his career, Mike Steiner returned to abstract painting, exploring new dimensions in color and surface, while also producing textile works. His late paintings radiate a contemplative calm, yet pulse with the latent energy characteristic of his entire output. In these canvases, one glimpses both the painterly tradition and a resolutely contemporary questioning, in dialogue with the likes of Gerhard Richter or Robert Rauschenberg.

What unites Steiner’s practice is a restless experimentality: an openness to new media, a desire to dissolve artistic hierarchies and to foster collaboration. His biography, as documented on the official artist page (Find more about Mike Steiner’s art and legacy here), reads as an atlas of postwar European creativity — from Berlin’s Kreuzberg to the avant-garde stages of New York, Florence, and beyond.

Fascination with Mike Steiner endures because his work embodies the irreducible energy of contemporary art: the productive friction between past and present, between the aesthetic and the political. By collecting and curating, as much as by painting and filming, Steiner models an ethos of generosity rare in any era.

For those seeking to understand the radical flows of contemporary arts Berlin, or the evolution of performance, painting and video on a European scale, a deeper dive into Mike Steiner’s world is essential. His life’s work is not simply an archive – it is a living invitation to question, participate and create.