Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Bridging Berlin’s Avant-Garde and Video Art

Mike Steiner’s contemporary art transforms boundaries—bridging avant-garde painting with revolutionary video art. Discover how his multifaceted oeuvre shapes Berlin’s cultural legacy.

Mike Steiner is much more than a name among Berlin’s artistic vanguard. As an undisputed protagonist of contemporary art, the creative trajectory of Mike Steiner invites us to revisit not only the boundaries of painting, performance, and moving images but also the pulse of a city that has long been an epicenter of artistic innovation. How does one redefine the edges between abstract painting and the ephemeral world of video art? In Steiner’s case, it’s not a question but a lived reality—one rooted in relentless curiosity and a relentless questioning of the possible.

From his formative years in the post-war crucible of Berlin—where Steiner emerged as a young artist at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition at just seventeen—his path reveals an unwavering engagement with the global currents of innovation. Early on, Steiner’s fascination was divided between classical painting and the moving image, a duality that predicted the breadth of his mature work. After training at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, Steiner’s artistic appetite led him from Kreuzberg’s bohemian heart to the neon-lit avenues of New York. There, he experienced the revolutionary pulse of Fluxus and Pop Art, encountering luminaries like Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Motherwell. These encounters not only influenced his creative vocabulary but initiated the shift from canvas to camera—a journey that would eventually transform contemporary arts in Berlin itself.

Steiner’s practice was characterized early on by a restless experimentation with media and styles. While his foundational years focused on expressive, gestural painting—often in dialogue with contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke—his return from New York in the late 1960s saw mounting doubts about the limits of painting. These meditations seeded his embrace of video, catalyzed by the possibilities offered by the nascent medium. As Berlin’s art scene evolved, so did Steiner’s: his own Hotel Steiner and later the legendary Studiogalerie became hothouses for the international avant-garde, welcoming iconoclasts like Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, Marina Abramovi?, and Ulay. The Studiogalerie, founded in 1974, proved pivotal for performing arts and experimental film—a Berlin parallel to Florence’s Studio Art/Tapes/22.

As a catalyst and chronicler, Mike Steiner gave video artists and performers unprecedented access to technology and space. Many now-legendary works were born or documented within these walls, from Marina Abramovi?’s „Freeing the Body“ (with Steiner at the camera) to Ulay’s audacious „Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst“, a performance that challenged the essence of art, risk, and legality itself. Steiner was not merely a facilitator, but an active participant—organizing, filming, conceptualizing, and ultimately rewriting the rules of artistic engagement.

The fruits of his relentless mediation between forms can be seen most strikingly in his acclaimed „Painted Tapes.“ Here, colorful abstraction floods across video stills, a blending of lusciously tactile paint and the flicker of electronic imagery. These works presaged wider discourses around the hybridization of media, standing alongside the innovations of contemporaries such as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and Richard Serra. Yet, Steiner’s method remained intensely personal—a poetics of material and process, attentive to both chance and formal decision, never losing sight of the interplay between permanence and the fleeting.

The 1980s and 90s marked an expansion for Mike Steiner as not only an artist but also an archivist of Contemporary Arts Berlin. His vast collection of videotapes, including rare documents of Ulay, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill, became a central archive for new media. Widely exhibited and eventually donated to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, this collection and Steiner’s own works have found a permanent home in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Here, his monumental solo show „Color Works 1995–98“ (1999) illuminated the depth and breadth of his cross-genre practice, confirming his status alongside international contemporaries in the realm of multimedia art.

For all the technical experimentation, Steiner’s output is marked by a profound engagement with themes of transience, mediation, and human perception. His abstract paintings of the 2000s, bathed in shifting color harmonies and gestural rhythms, reflect a continuation of the same exploratory urge that defined his earliest films and actions. For many, the canvases resonate with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, yet they remain rooted in a Berliner dialectic—restless, urban, and always attuned to the fractures of contemporary life. His final years saw a return to painting and textile work, marked by an embrace of chance and serendipity as guiding insights.

Mike Steiner’s role as an initiator and networker cannot be overstated. Through roles as curator, lecturer, and juror—for example at the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm—he advocated for video art’s recognition within the institutional canon. His influential TV project „Videogalerie“ from 1985 to 1990 was visionary, prefiguring later TV-based art dissemination and providing platforms for artists before the digital era.

In reviewing Mike Steiner’s legacy, one finds not only a unique body of work but a blueprint for the cross-pollination of genres and generations. It is in this sense that his life’s work bridges the impulses of Berlin’s avant-garde with global discourse, influencing not only his direct collaborators but generations of artists intrigued by the intersection of technology, performance, and painting. For fans of Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, or Marina Abramovi?, Steiner’s practice offers a historical context and a fertile, underexplored ground that continues to shape the narrative of European and international art.

Why does Mike Steiner’s oeuvre remain so relevant? Perhaps it is because, more than most, Steiner recognized that art’s most urgent calling lies in its ability to invoke participation, disrupt convention, and always—unfailingly—extend the limits of perception. His legacy lives not only in the halls of Hamburger Bahnhof or the archives of Berlin Video, but in the ongoing dialogue between artists, media, and audiences across continents.

For those seeking to dive deeper into the radical world of Mike Steiner and experience his paintings, performances, and video experiments, his well-curated archive remains a vital resource. Contemporary art is rarely as vibrant, experimental, and essential as it is through Mike Steiner’s eye—inviting us all to question, partake, and look again.

@ ad-hoc-news.de