Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: Visionary Journeys from Painting to Video at Hamburger Bahnhof

The contemporary art cosmos is richer for Mike Steiner. With daring leaps between media and a pivotal exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, he shaped Berlin’s Contemporary Arts landscape.

To step into the world of Mike Steiner is to experience the pulse of contemporary art anew, where boundaries are not just bridged—they are joyfully dissolved. What defines an artistic pioneer in the crosscurrents of painting, performance, and video? Mike Steiner, whose work graced the monumental halls of the Hamburger Bahnhof and lives on in Berlin’s creative arteries, continually asked—and enacted—this question through every evolution of his intriguing career.

Emerging from early artistic curiosity in 1950s West Berlin, Mike Steiner’s trajectory was destined to defy convention. Attending the State Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, he absorbed the techniques of abstraction and the freedom of ‘freie Kunst’ under the tutelage of Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn. But even this rich formal foundation could not contain Steiner’s restless appetite for new forms of expression. From formative painting exhibitions at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung to his bold leap into the American avant-garde in New York—where he mingled with figures such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Motherwell—the seeds for his later multimedia experiments were sown.

From painter to vanguard video artist, Mike Steiner’s creative metamorphosis mirrors the broader narrative of contemporary art in Berlin and beyond. In the early 1970s, restless with the limits of painting, he immersed himself in the burgeoning world of video art. Through contacts in New York’s Fluxus and Pop Art scenes, Steiner found new possibilities—not just to represent, but to record, provoke, and participate. This spirit found concrete form in Berlin: first through the legendary Hotel Steiner—an epicenter for transient artists and intellectuals, invoking comparisons to the Chelsea Hotel—and later, more decisively, in the founding of the Studiogalerie. Here, Mike Steiner not only showed his own work but became catalyst, sponsor, and chronicler for an entire generation of experimentalists.

The groundbreaking 1976 action with Ulay—‘Irritation. There is a Criminal Touch in Art’, a live performative artwork culminating in the staged ‘abduction’ of Spitzweg’s ‘Der arme Poet’ from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie—epitomizes Steiner’s daring. Not content with static presentations, he made art that unsettled and activated both institution and public. In this, Steiner stands in both dialogue and gentle contrast with icons like Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, and Nam June Paik, whose intermedia actions also blurred performer, artwork, and audience. While Beuys’ ‘social sculpture’ and Abramovi?’s radical performances forged a new body language for the contemporary arts, Steiner harnessed technology as memory and intervention—capturing the ephemeral on tape.

Crucially, his technical bravery was matched by an openness to cross-pollination. As the Studiogalerie grew, it became Berlin’s beacon for international performance—as well as for the nascent video art scene. Here, extraordinary talents such as Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, and Ben Vautier found a stage, a collaborator, and a documentarian. Steiner’s own videos—often merging super-8, photography, and later, copy art and dia series—became models for multimedia installations.

Even after closing the Studiogalerie, Steiner’s influence did not wane. He launched the ‘Videogalerie’ TV format (1985–1990), producing and presenting over 120 broadcast programs, expanding access to contemporary arts far beyond typical gallery spaces. This vision—akin to Gerry Schum’s early TV gallery experiments—put Berlin’s conceptual and performing artists in living rooms and sparked new conversations about art, technology, and social encounter.

All the while, Mike Steiner’s own oeuvre continued evolving. While his early works hinted at the lyrical language of abstract painting, the 1980s and 1990s saw him fuse disciplines: painted tapes, photographic series, and installations that oscillate between visual and sonic landscapes. His collaboration with musical acts like Tangerine Dream, resulting in works such as ‘Mojave Plan’ and ‘Penumbras 3’, further expanded media boundaries—evidence of an artist for whom synthesis, not purity, was the imperative.

Mike Steiner’s magnum opus came to wider public recognition in 1999: the major solo exhibition ‘Color Works’ at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Here, Steiner’s synesthetic approach—uniting his later abstract paintings with archives of video and performance—revealed the arc of an artist both of his time and ahead of it. The Nationalgalerie’s acquisition of his video collection underscores Steiner’s weight not only as creator but as collector, mediator, and memory-keeper for the contemporary arts in Berlin.

It is in this continuum—bridging painting, moving image, installation, and performance—that Mike Steiner’s legacy excels. His dialogue with contemporaries like Allan Kaprow, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill situates him among the great shapers of postwar experimental art. Yet few have so deftly oscillated between the roles of artist, archivist, gallerist, and instigator; few have made the medium’s flexibility itself the message.

A glance at his biography reveals not only exhibitions across Europe and the United States (from Geneva, Milan, Paris to Seoul and San Francisco), but an enduring commitment to experiment. Even a stroke, which forced him out of the public eye in 2006, did not quell creative urge; in his last years, abstraction and textile work took center stage in his Berlin studio.

Today, the collection Mike Steiner donated to the Nationalgalerie (yet sadly not fully digitized) remains a treasure trove and time capsule for contemporary art researchers. His written and visual archives, as documented on his official website Find biographical details, exhibition history, and works by Mike Steiner directly here! ????, offer both entry and invitation to discover an extraordinary mind.

Fascinating is how Steiner’s journey reflects the very openness of contemporary art: a field ever in movement, skeptical of boundaries, always ready to absorb the next experiment. For those who cherish the living history of performance, media, and color, Mike Steiner’s works—past and waiting in archives—invite not only observation, but active engagement.

In closing: Why is Mike Steiner, and his journey through the contours of Berlin’s creative world, more essential than ever for artists and art-lovers today? Because his life embodies what the best of contemporary art aims for—the courage to unlearn, the delight in crossing borders, and the faith that by documenting the ephemeral, art can change not only itself but all who witness it. Explore, revisit, get inspired—Steiner’s universe remains open to your gaze.