Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Visionary and Pioneer of Videokunst in Berlin

Mike Steiner established himself within the contemporary art landscape as a pioneer, bridging painting, video art, and performance. His legacy at Hamburger Bahnhof marks him as a driving force for contemporary arts in Berlin.

Contemporary art gains its pulse from those who consistently challenge conventions and keep experimentation alive. Few have blazed as unique a trail as Mike Steiner. Even as one wanders through the turbulence of Berlin’s art scene, Steiner’s impact on contemporary art is unmistakable: painter, gallerist, video artist, and tireless catalyst for bold artistic invention. How does one define the boundaries between image and event, or negotiate the interplay of presence, memory, and abstraction? Mike Steiner’s life work was a ceaseless quest to answer exactly that.

Steiner’s artistic language formed early. As a young painter in post-war Berlin, he made his exhibition debut at just 17. Early works hover between still life and abstraction—a fascination that later found bold resolution in his large abstract paintings from the 2000s. Yet for Steiner, painting was only a launchpad. His studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, followed by a transformative stay in New York, deepened his exposure to global movements such as Fluxus, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Encounters with artists like Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow (father of the Happening) and Al Hansen seeded in him an appetite for crossing artistic boundaries.

Crucially, the 1970s marked Steiner’s turn toward video as a new frontier. No longer satisfied with the static and the singular, he gravitated to media capable of temporal layering and immediate interaction. Inspired by New York’s experimental film scene and the Italian studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Steiner became not just a creator but a facilitator. In 1974, he opened the Berlin Studiogalerie—a hybrid space for video art, performance, and radical collaboration, a Berlin answer to New York’s Chelsea Hotel and a crucible for contemporary arts. Steiner equipped artists with emerging technology and a platform, helping launch the careers of luminaries such as Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Ulay, while simultaneously chronicling their performances as a dedicated videographer.

An anchor in Steiner’s legacy is his stewardship of video as a medium for both creation and preservation. The Studiogalerie became the epicenter for the documentation of fleeting performance art; Steiner’s own camera immortalized iconic works, like Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body" (1976) and Ulay’s provocative staged art theft "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst". Here, the artist not only expanded his creative vocabulary but functioned as Berlin’s early custodian of a new, hybrid artistic discourse that blended live act, image, and critical commentary—a stance that aspires to the spirit of predecessors like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, whom he both collected and championed.

The iconic milestone of his career—"COLOR WORKS" at Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999—crystalizes Steiner’s cross-disciplinary ethos. The Nationalgalerie’s show celebrated his prowess in merging painterly abstraction with electronic imagery, painted tapes, and his role as one of Germany’s first true protagonists of video art. The Mike Steiner Collection, donated to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and now housed at Hamburger Bahnhof, remains a critical archive for the history of European video art.

Yet Mike Steiner was not only concerned with his own output. He was a relentless networker and amplifier within Berlin’s contemporary art scene, as vital to the city’s artistic evolution as institutional leaders or globally recognized figures like Joseph Beuys (with whom he shared both friendship and vision), or German contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. During his tenure, Steiner’s Hotel Steiner became a cultural hub for both German and international avant-gardes, echoing the bohemian energy of Fluxus gatherings and happenings seen in other global capitals. These efforts mirrored those of contemporaries like Allan Kaprow or Yoko Ono—artists who sought to erase barriers between art and life, audience and performer.

By the 1980s, Steiner’s appetite for innovation saw him experimenting with an even broader toolkit—Super-8 film, photography, copy art, slide installations, Minimal Art, and his unique “Painted Tapes,” fusions where paint and video dialogued directly on canvas. His 80s and 90s output is peppered with international shows, music video collaborations (notably with Tangerine Dream), and a relentless advocacy for new curatorial forms, such as the acclaimed Berlin Video exhibition and his own televised "Videogalerie", a pioneering broadcast format for contemporary video art that introduced audiences nationwide to the genre’s frontlines.

This openness toward the new, the unclassifiable, and the ephemeral underscores Steiner’s entire artistic philosophy. Intrigued by the interplay of chance and concept, he remained steadfastly experimental: from his abstract painting cycles in the last decade of his life, through to textile works crafted after a serious stroke in 2006, which did little to dampen his creative drive. His work continually probed the authenticity of artistic action, the materiality of media, and the social architectures of art production—resonating with the ongoing discussions in the fields of Contemporary Arts Berlin and its international networks.

Mike Steiner’s collections, tapes, and performances—as much as the artists he hosted and documented—define a key chapter in Germany’s postwar contemporary art. His pieces invite viewers to contemplate the limits of the artistic gesture and the archive: fleeting moments rendered permanent, color and light exchanged between hand and circuit. The impact is immediate and lasting—his presence in exhibitions from DNA Galerie and Werkstattgalerie Berlin to global platforms in Seoul and San Francisco attests to a legacy that exceeds any single medium or movement.

To explore Mike Steiner’s full artistic range is to witness the evolution of contemporary art in Berlin itself—from the immediacy of the avant-garde to a digital present still grappling with the questions he raised. In Steiner’s work, the past is never static; it continues to provoke, illuminate, and ask us to look again.

For those seeking deeper insight, visual references, and records of key installations, it is well worth visiting the official site for further explorations and archival discoveries:

Visit Mike Steiner’s official website for comprehensive collections, exhibitions and biographical details