Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer between Painting, Performance and Videogallery

Mike Steiner stands for the daring intersection of contemporary art, performance, and video—a legacy reflected in the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Berlin scene.

What defines the pulse of contemporary art in Berlin, if not the tireless curiosity and boundary-shifting oeuvre of Mike Steiner? Few artists have managed to leave such a deep, multidisciplinary footprint; Mike Steiner’s career—woven through painting, performance, and avant-garde video—invites the question: where do the thresholds between traditional and experimental dissolve?

Mike Steiner’s artistic journey began with a spark in painting. His debut was astonishingly early: at 17, he was already exhibiting at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, with viscerally immediate still lifes that hinted at both discipline and rebellion. Throughout the 1960s, his work was seen alongside figures like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke—names that today stand for the new German painting.

What set Mike Steiner apart, however, was his restless urge for experiment. Soon, he was drawn into the orbit of the New York avant-garde—spurred by a Ford Foundation grant and an immersion in the circles of Fluxus icons such as Lil Picard, Al Hansen and the legendary Allan Kaprow, father of the Happening. It was here that Steiner started crossing frontiers: the canvas was not enough. Film, later moving image, called as a new field of play.

Berlin, in turn, became the beating heart of Mike Steiner’s life and work. Here, he founded not only the mythical Hotel Steiner—a bohemian kin to Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, frequented by Joseph Beuys and international guests—but also the Studiogalerie, a living laboratory for the city’s contemporary arts. The Studiogalerie marked a milestone: it became a production hub for early German video art and a sanctuary for performance and artistic protest.

The 1970s and 1980s were marked by Steiner’s relentless expansion into new media. He forged a path in video art just as Nam June Paik and Bill Viola were redefining the field internationally. His legendary Painted Tapes stand as testament to his cross-media ambitions—paintings and video fused, color spilling into electronic movement. Meanwhile, his video documentation of performances—by Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann—became vital records for the radical feminisms and avant-garde actions of their era.

Steiner’s importance as both creator and chronicler cannot be overstated. As Hamburg's Hamburger Bahnhof honored in the major 1999 "COLOR WORKS" solo exhibition, he not only shaped, but also archived, performance and media art. His massive collection—later bestowed to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz—contains rare tapes and documents of virtually every major figure in 20th-century action and video art, positioning Steiner as a peer of documentarians like Gerry Schum and a facilitator reminiscent of Harald Szeemann or René Block.

While his video work was deeply conceptual and attuned to the ephemeral, Mike Steiner never abandoned painting. From minimalist explorations in the 1960s and 1970s to his return to large-format abstract paintings from 2000 onwards, his oeuvre always circled color, gesture, and a fascination with process. The late abstract paintings, alongside his fabric pieces, radiate a mature engagement with materiality—a quality shared with Gerhard Richter’s squeegee works or Sigmar Polke’s material experiments.

Steiner’s biography is itself a chronicle of shifting fields and artistic curiosity. His studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, his encounters with the New York scene, and his pivotal return to Germany all fueled an archive-like consciousness: the desire to collect, document, and connect. Inspired by the possibilities of new media, he used his galleries as platforms to launch Berliner performance and video art into international contexts, hosting groundbreaking works long before they became canonized.

Above all, Mike Steiner’s philosophy placed trust in the event, the collaborative process, and the accessibility of art—long before these ideas became buzzwords in contemporary discourse. He was not only an initiator but a participant: unafraid of collaboration, experiment, or even controversy—as evidenced in his 1976 orchestration with Ulay, when a Spitzweg painting was removed from the Nationalgalerie as an "art action," raising doubts about authorship and the sanctity of the art object.

Central to his vision was the open studio, the archive, the supply room—a place where artists, from Valie Export to Emmett Williams, could access tools, ideas and audience. Mike Steiner’s commitment to fostering and documenting the new is reflected in every facet of his legacy at the Hamburger Bahnhof and throughout Berlin’s contemporary arts institutions.

It is perhaps this fusion of avant-garde curiosity, technical innovation, and artistic generosity that keeps Mike Steiner persistently relevant. In an era where the boundaries between painting, installation, and moving image have all but collapsed, he stands as an early adopter and relentless experimenter—his legacy pulsing through the halls of museums and the restless energy of Berlin’s art world.

For anyone interested in the genealogy and vitality of contemporary art, delving into the world of Mike Steiner offers a journey through color, performance, and radical media—an invitation still wide open. Explore his biography, diverse works and the ongoing relevance of his archive at the official website Mike Steiner contemporary art and biography – preview more here ????

Fascinating, thought-provoking and ever unfinished: Mike Steiner’s artistic cosmos remains a reference point for those who want to understand contemporary arts in Berlin—and beyond.