Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer and Visionary of Multimedia Expression

Mike Steiner has profoundly shaped contemporary art through groundbreaking video works, vibrant abstract paintings, and radical exhibitions that redefined Berlin’s art landscape.

In the restless sphere of contemporary art, few figures are as enigmatic and influential as Mike Steiner. His oeuvre traverses boundaries—between color and image, between the fleeting and the archival, between personal experiment and collective avant-garde. But what is it that makes the legacy of Mike Steiner pulse so vibrantly in the heart of Berlin's Contemporary Arts movement?

For over five decades, Mike Steiner reimagined the artist’s role: not just through his vivid abstract paintings or as a pioneer of performance and video art, but also as an instigator of creative networks and spaces. His legendary Hotel Steiner in Berlin became a crucible for experimentation, compared time and again to the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, offering a home 'far away from home' for international visionaries such as Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. Here, the boundaries between life and art became deliciously blurred—a principle that would shape his multifaceted legacy.

Steiner's artistic journey mirrors the evolution of contemporary art itself. Beginning as a gifted painter, he made an early mark at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959 while still a teenager, presenting tender still lifes that hinted at a restless curiosity. As the 1960s unfolded, Steiner’s trajectory took him to New York at the crest of Fluxus, Pop Art, and Happening—a city seething with the energy of figures like Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, and Allan Kaprow. It was here, immersed in the studios and salons of giants, that Steiner’s skepticism of painting grew, propelling him towards new expressive frontiers: the moving image and the charged immediacy of the performance.

He returned to Berlin carrying this spirit of innovation, opening his Studiogalerie in 1974, a space modeled after the experimental Art/Tapes/22 studio in Florence. Here, contemporary art in Germany found one of its first sanctuaries for video. Steiner was not content with simply producing his own works—though his video collaborations with artists like Al Hansen and Marina Abramovi? have become legendary—but insisted on equipping fellow artists with the tools to disrupt, document, and define new genres.

His work from this transformative era cannot be overstated. The infamous 1976 action "Irritation—Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" with Ulay, where a prized Spitzweg painting was temporarily removed from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and installed in a Kreuzberg living room, challenged institutional boundaries and probed the nature of authorship, value, and the very definition of art. It was not merely a stunt, but a sharp conceptual intervention, its resonance echoing into today’s conversations around art activism and institutional critique. Steiner's documentation of performances, including Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body," proves essential to the global video art archive today.

It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart honored him with a major solo exhibition in 1999, and houses much of his stunning video collection. The 1999 show "COLOR WORKS" highlighted Steiner’s ongoing dialogue between painting and video: luminous abstract works exude the same experimental courage as his media-based pieces. As the museum’s archives demonstrate, Steiner’s collection includes rare footage and works by Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, and Valerie Export—placing him among such international contemporaries as Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, and Vito Acconci, whose practices similarly bridged the gap between image, action, and installation.

Throughout the 1980s, Steiner’s exploratory spirit only deepened. He embraced photography, Copy Art, Super-8 film, and the innovative "Painted Tapes": hand-painted video works that merge pigment and pixel in poetic fusion. His TV format "Videogalerie" (1985-1990) brought avant-garde video to a broad German audience—over 120 episodes, produced, presented, and curated by Steiner, framed the diversity of international video art and cemented his role as both creator and curator par excellence.

Steiner's biography reads like a chronicle of Berlin’s transformation from divided metropolis to capital of contemporary arts. Born in Allenstein in 1941, he settled in West Berlin, studying at the State School of Fine Arts under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, before his transatlantic encounters further shaped his tactile approach to painting and the open-ended possibilities of media art. As a teacher, organizer, and juror (notably for the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program), Steiner continuously advocated for new, even "irritating" artistic forms, displaying a rare commitment to the collective momentum of artistic evolution.

Kenner schätzen besonders his interdisciplinary ethos. In every series—be it the photographic "Testbild als Readymade," fabric works from his later years, or monumental installations—Steiner’s concern is always the interplay of perception, time, and participation. His abstract paintings from the 2000s, with their luminous layers and chromatic depth, suggest a continuity between his earliest oil works and the 'electronic painting' of his videos.

In retrospect, Mike Steiner embodies the radical openness of contemporary art: a relentless crossing of disciplines, a refusal of easy categorization, a fascination with the ephemeral event preserved only as trace. His ongoing influence is visible not only in museum holdings like those of Hamburger Bahnhof but also in the ethos of today's performance and video artists, whose work continues to question the very substance of the image, the gesture, and the archive.

Why does Mike Steiner’s art matter today? Because he reminds us that art’s true territory lies in experimentation—the friction between seeing and showing, doing and remembering. To delve deeper into his paintings, videos, and installations, it is worth exploring the extensive materials, images, and critical essays on his official site.

Experience the World of Mike Steiner: More Works, Archives, and the Artistic Legacy here.

There, the breadth of his contributions to contemporary art becomes tangible—and the narrative of Berlin’s ever-changing art landscape comes alive through his eyes.