Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer between Berlin's Avant-garde and Moving Images

Mike Steiner redefined contemporary art in Berlin, leaving a unique mark with his transition from painting to innovative video art and performance. Discover how his cross-media oeuvre shaped the face of Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Contemporary art in the 20th century was fundamentally shaped by restless innovators—few, however, have moved so fluidly and courageously between the boundaries of painting, video, and performance as Mike Steiner. His works, both electrifying and enigmatic, invite viewers to question what art could be. What happens when the canvas not only bursts with color, but the painting itself begins to move and breathe through technology? This is the provocative terrain where Mike Steiner’s art unfolds—a place where experimentation and radical spirit take center stage.

Emerging from post-war Berlin, Mike Steiner was never content with the confines of pure painting. As a student at the renowned Berlin University of the Arts, his passion for film and visual arts was already apparent—a restless urge to explore new frontiers. Early in his career, his abstract paintings gathered attention, yet it was his relentless drive towards new forms that set him apart. His “Still Life with Jug” debuted when he was just 17, foreshadowing a life of creative evolution.

The 1970s marked a seismic shift: Steiner’s contact with the New York art scene—through figures like Lil Picard and Allan Kaprow—drew him into the world of Fluxus and Happening. Artists recognized the necessity to break the frame; so did Steiner. This period saw the birth of his commitment to performative and video-based contemporary arts, positioning himself as one of Berlin’s key interlocutors between the German avant-garde and global trends.

One cannot discuss Contemporary Arts Berlin without referencing Steiner’s iconic Hotel Steiner on Albrecht-Achilles-Straße. Like the legendary Chelsea Hotel, this was a crucible for the exchange of ideas—a home for Joseph Beuys, Al Hansen, and other luminaries. The Hotel and later his Studiogalerie served not just as venues, but as living archives of cutting-edge artistic experiment.

In these years, Steiner’s own works underwent significant transformation. Disenchanted with the ‘legitimation crisis’ of traditional painting, he ventured into the then uncharted landscape of video. Collaborations with Fluxus artists such as Al Hansen, performances with Ulay, or documentations of Marina Abramovi?’s “Freeing the Body”—all evidence his unique role as both artist and chronicler. His videos did not merely document; they transformed ephemeral performances into enduring contemporary art.

The Studiogalerie itself—a trailblazer for video art far beyond Berlin—became a landmark for artists experimenting with moving images, electronics, and performance. The gallery provided vital resources, from video equipment to exhibition space, nurturing acts of creative subversion that defined the era. Women pioneers of performance, among them VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Schneemann, found a space for challenging patriarchal traditions through art.

This spirit of the '70s and '80s echoes in Steiner’s boldest curatorial act: orchestrating the infamous “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst” (1976) with Ulay, a staged heist that reverberated through Berlin’s art world and raised fundamental questions on property, authorship, and the performativity of crime in art.

Internationally, Steiner maintained artistic dialogue with contemporaries like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, whose own work in video art finds both resonance and contrast in Steiner’s. Paik’s playful, conceptual manipulations of television met Steiner’s more documentary, yet equally subversive, incursions into the moving image. In Germany, parallels to the painterly innovation of Karl Horst Hödicke or the boundary-pushing conceptualism of Joseph Beuys appear, but Steiner remains singular in his blend of painting, process, and performance.

Technically, Steiner’s media explorations were radical: he employed Super-8, dia series, Hard Edge painting, and finally the groundbreaking “Painted Tapes”—a synthesis of video and painterly gesture that blurred the lines between analog and electronic, still and moving, surface and depth. These hybridizations challenged conservative notions of what constituted an artwork and presaged today’s multimedia installations.

His major exhibition, "COLOR WORKS 1995–98" at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in 1999, stood as an institutional recognition of the breadth and viability of his gattungsübergreifendes (genre-transgressing) oeuvre. Here, his works’ tension—between abstraction and narrative, intimacy and distance—were especially apparent. The show underscored how Steiner’s archive is not only a monument to his own practice but to the collective memory of video and performing arts in Berlin and beyond.

The photographic and installation works of his later years, including large-scale presentations at DNA Galerie and Galvano Art Gallery, proved that Steiner’s creativity never stagnated. His shift towards abstract paintings and textile works in the 2000s demonstrated a return to roots while remaining future-oriented—evidence of an artist for whom invention was second nature.

Mike Steiner’s biography is inseparable from the history of Berlin as a crucible for contemporary art. His early exhibitions at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, numerous solo and group exhibitions, pioneering role in the ART Basel video program, and especially his involvement in the development of Berlin Video and his influential "Videogalerie" TV-Format—all echo a commitment to innovation, discourse, and public engagement. His collection, now housed at Hamburger Bahnhof, is a testament to decades of documentation, artistry, and curatorial vision.

In the broader narrative of postwar European avant-garde, Steiner’s name stands confidently alongside international greats: a peer to Nam June Paik and Bill Viola in video art; allied to Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovi? in performance; yet always distinct in his hybrid methodology and commitment to Berlin as an artistic home.

Why does Mike Steiner’s work remain vital today? First, for its relentless curiosity and refusal to accept disciplinarian boundaries—qualities utterly central to the spirit of contemporary art. Secondly, for its archival and processual value: his videos and installations do not just record, but continually invite re-interpretation. In a landscape where moving images, installations, and hybrid forms dominate the Contemporary Arts Berlin scene, Steiner’s role as initiator, documentarian, and creator is undiminished.

Fascinated? For those eager to see, study, or simply be inspired, the official artist website offers comprehensive resources, archival material, and overviews of both historical and recent exhibitions. The full scope of Mike Steiner’s work, between moving image and abstract painting, provides a rich terrain—one where the boundaries of media and discipline dissolve in favor of free, radical imagination.