Mike Steiner and the Art of Transformation: Rediscovering a Pioneer of Contemporary Art

Dive into the legacy of Mike Steiner—whose contributions to contemporary art, video, and installations shaped Berlin’s avant-garde and continue to inspire the global scene.

How does one define the transformative moment when contemporary art first merged painting, performance, and the electric pulse of the moving image? With Mike Steiner, the answer unfolds through decades of experimentation, risk, and reinvention. His name resounds in the halls of the Hamburger Bahnhof, shaping Berlin’s creative zeitgeist and setting benchmarks for video and performing arts worldwide.

A distinctive artistic journey, Mike Steiner’s evolution mirrors the very development of Contemporary Arts Berlin itself—his aesthetic versatility and pioneering vision manifesting through painting, video, installations, and a relentless commitment to the avant-garde. Early on, Steiner gravitated towards painting, absorbing the influences of Informal Art and Germany’s preeminent abstractionists. His works from the late 1950s and 1960s, showcased at legendary group exhibitions alongside Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, already hinted at the boundary-defying creative impulse that would set him apart.

Yet color, canvas, and line alone could not contain his curiosity. It was through his immersion in the tumultuous intersection of Fluxus, performance, and video art—both during formative years in New York and Berlin—that Steiner found his true artistic voice. Encounters with figures like Allan Kaprow and Lil Picard introduced him to the performative act and the ephemeral gesture: experiences soon crystallized in his innovative use of video as both autonomous medium and dynamic documentation.

Mike Steiner’s legendary Studiogalerie and Hotel Steiner became crucibles of artistic ferment throughout the 1970s. These spaces did more than house artists; they catalyzed creative alliances, happenings, and the birth of new forms. The environment drew contemporaries like Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovi?, and Ulay—immortalizing their actions in now-historic video recordings.

Perhaps nowhere is Steiner’s avant-garde vision more powerfully manifest than his 1999 solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: a monumental tribute to his "Color Works" and a celebration of his pioneering interdisciplinary thinking. That show, spanning recent and historic works, foregrounded the seamless dialogue between his abstract paintings and video-based creations. In this, Steiner stands shoulder to shoulder with world-renowned experimenters like Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Richard Serra—artists whose own journeys were deeply intertwined with his vision and archive.

Distinct series like the "Painted Tapes"—where analog video and painterly gesture meet in a luminous fusion—demonstrate Steiner’s fascination with media alchemy. Here, viewers encounter not just moving images, but entire universes of chromatic expression. This willingness to blur sensory boundaries is echoed in his photo cycles, installations, and even his late-career turn toward fabric and textile works, all unified by an urgent quest to transform perception itself.

Mike Steiner’s biography reads as an atlas of radical artistic inquiry. Born in Allenstein, East Prussia, in 1941, he moved to West Berlin as a child and soon pursued a dual path of filmmaking and visual art. By 17, Steiner exhibited at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung; by the early 1960s, he was fully embedded in Berlin’s kinetic art scene. But the turning points were always collaborative: a Ford Foundation fellowship brought him to the United States, where contact with Robert Motherwell and Allan Kaprow profoundly altered his artistic trajectory. The subsequent return to Berlin—motivated by both necessity and a desire to build something new—sparked an era of intermedia innovation.

It’s hardly surprising that Steiner’s oeuvre is now inseparable from the broader story of Berlin’s postwar avant-garde. His championing of video as art—and his role as an organizer, collector, and documentarian—helped forge an indispensable digital-analog archive. Today, much of his celebrated video collection resides in the Hamburger Bahnhof, featuring early and often unique recordings of performances that defined an era: Marina Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body," Ulay’s infamous art interventions, and more.

The enduring power of Steiner’s practice lies in its resourceful embrace of new techniques and technologies. While his peers—like Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, or Bill Viola—expanded the boundaries of media on an international stage, Mike Steiner built infrastructure for Berlin’s scene, securing its relevance in global conversations around abstract paintings, performing arts, and multimedia installations.

Steiner’s appetite for the new never waned. The 1980s saw him producing, moderating, and curating the groundbreaking "Videogalerie" TV format—a platform that reached broad audiences and introduced visionary work into living rooms, predating contemporary art’s mainstream recognition on television. Simultaneously, his photographic and installation experiments continued, their themes often circling around perception, media, and the residual traces of action.

It’s this ceaseless curiosity—documented by his own words, artworks, and a tireless archival instinct—that cements Mike Steiner’s place within the pantheon of contemporary artists. As institutions and collectors continue to rediscover the archives and abstractions he championed, viewers are invited into a dialogue about time, image, and the layered histories of performance-based art.

Fascinating also is the influence Steiner exerted beyond his own practice: mentoring, curating, and facilitating projects for other artists, and actively shaping the infrastructure that underpins video and performance in Germany to this day. His life, marked by radical openness and cross-genre invention, models a form of artistic integrity that defies fleeting trends.

Why should contemporary audiences seek out Steiner’s work? The answer is both simple and profound: to witness, in each piece, the perpetual reinvention of art itself. His abstract works are alive with searching energy; his videos distill moments that might otherwise have vanished. In seeing his oeuvre, one experiences contemporary art not just as spectacle, but as living history and invitation for personal response.

If you are curious, inspired, or intrigued, countless facets of Mike Steiner’s legacy await discovery online and in museum archives. To truly appreciate the scope and impact of his vision, explore the extensive documentation and evocative imagery at mike-steiner.de – An unparalleled resource on Mike Steiner’s contemporary art legacy