Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer Shaping Video, Performance and Abstraction

Mike Steiner redefined contemporary art through groundbreaking video, performance and abstract painting. Explore the artistic vision and legacy of this pivotal Berlin figure.

What does it mean when an artist blurs the line between painting, video, and live performance until each discipline is transformed? This is the question that animates the remarkable oeuvre of Mike Steiner, whose legacy as a contemporary art trailblazer resonates powerfully from Berlin and far beyond. Renowned for his pioneering role in video art and his radical rethinking of artistic media, Mike Steiner's multidisciplinary work remains a touchstone for the evolving nature of contemporary arts in Berlin and on the global stage.

Mike Steiner’s story is one of continuous artistic questioning. Born Klaus-Michel Steiner in 1941 in Allenstein (now Olsztyn, Poland), he came of age in the vibrant, divided city of West Berlin. His early encounters with both painting and film set the tone for a practice defined by restless innovation. By age 17, Steiner debuted publicly at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung with still-life paintings—evidence of prodigious talent and early curiosity for the language of abstraction. His studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts Berlin under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn left lasting traces in his evolving pictorial vocabulary, but, even as he explored informel painting, a deeper urge for experimentation simmered beneath the surface.

Like Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke, contemporaries who likewise found Berlin a crucible for radical thinking, Steiner sought new artistic ground amid the city’s avant-garde. Yet his journey led quickly beyond Germany’s borders. The cultural dynamism of 1960s New York—where he befriended luminaries like Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen—and his fascination with Pop Art and Fluxus, significantly expanded his horizons as both painter and provocateur. Emboldened, Steiner returned to Berlin, where the momentum of global currents shaped his next artistic incarnations.

The 1970s marked a turning point in Steiner’s career and in the landscape of contemporary art in Berlin. Sensing the limitations of traditional painting, Steiner turned to emergent media. His legendary Hotel Steiner and the subsequent Studiogalerie became hotbeds for the international avant-garde, drawing artists such as Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Marina Abramovi?, and Ulay. These vibrant spaces—Berlin’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel—throbbed with the intellectual pulse of performative and experimental art. Here, Steiner facilitated dialogue, offered residencies, and, crucially, provided artists with then-expensive video equipment. The Studiogalerie soon gained distinction as an independent platform for artist-driven video, performance and installation—a role echoing that of Cologne’s Wulf Herzogenrath for Düsseldorf and Nam June Paik for New York.

As an artist, Mike Steiner harnessed video not simply as a means of documentation, but as an autonomous form of expression. His groundbreaking video works, often created in collaboration with figures like Al Hansen, Marina Abramovi? or Ben Vautier, channel the intensity and immediacy unique to the medium. In the notorious 1976 action Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst, co-orchestrated with Ulay, Steiner documented the staged theft of Spitzweg’s 'Der arme Poet' from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie—an audacious act that blurred lines between art, activism, and criminality. Through such experiments, Steiner established himself both as an artist and as an archivist of an artform in constant transformation.

The Hamburg Bahnhof–Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart held his most significant solo exhibition in 1999, spotlighting Steiner’s ‘Color Works’ and underscoring his role as a bridge between earlier painterly traditions and contemporary media art. Today, his substantial collection—encompassing key works by Bill Viola, Richard Serra, and Gary Hill, among others—is housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof, asserting his status not just as a creator, but as a prescient collector and chronicler of the performing arts.

Steiner’s technical inventiveness did not stop at video. From the mid-1980s, he forged bold new connections between painting and electronics, crafting his compelling "Painted Tapes" series—an intermedial fusion of color, gesture and moving image that anticipated the digital hybridizations of later generations. In composition, these works echo the edge-of-sound abstraction of Tangerine Dream’s electronic music, which Steiner visually captured on film during the band's 1982 tour. Painted Tapes won recognition at the Toronto Video/Culture festival, cementing Steiner’s status among video innovators like Nam June Paik and Joan Jonas, yet always through his singular vision.

In contrast to contemporaries like Marina Abramovi? or Joseph Beuys—whose practices circled ritual and myth—Steiner’s approach remained rooted in Berlin’s urban reality, shaped by the city’s shifting social and political dynamics. His interest in the documentary, the ephemeral, and the infrastructural runs like a thread through all his practice, from his involvement in educational programming to his later photographic cycles, such as "Das Testbild als Readymade." His role as producer and moderator of over 120 episodes of the ‘Videogalerie’ televisual format (1985–1990) brought the dialogue on video art into German living rooms, broadening its audience and influence in ways few artists dared envision.

Throughout his multifaceted career, Steiner’s philosophical outlook championed communication, process, and the democratization of art—values intrinsic to the spirit of contemporary art. He was, in every sense, a catalyst: a connector of artists, an inventor of platforms, and a relentless experimenter with media. His later years found him returning to more introspective forms, particularly abstract painting and textile work—evidence of a desire to synthesize decades of artistic exploration.

Set against the titans of the international contemporary art world—Dan Graham, Valie Export, Gary Hill—Mike Steiner stands out as an artist who both archived and advanced the field, infusing Berlin’s contemporary arts with a restlessly experimental, yet always profoundly human touch. Connoisseurs still value his sensitivity to time, color, and ephemeral phenomena; newcomers marvel at how a single artist could traverse so many media without losing expressive coherence.

In the contemporary art scene of today, characterized by endless crossovers between disciplines, Mike Steiner's practice feels both prophetic and essential. Those looking to grasp the origins of multimedia, performance and video installation in Berlin find in his work a necessary reference point. The full significance of his legacy can only be appreciated by engaging deeply with his life, his collected archive, and—most powerfully—his art itself.

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