Mike Steiner: Pioneer of Contemporary Art and Videokunst in Berlin’s Avant-Garde

Mike Steiner’s visionary approach to contemporary art bridged abstract painting, performance, and video, marking him as a trailblazer in Berlin’s cultural evolution and at Hamburger Bahnhof.

How does one chart the pulse of contemporary art, when its heartbeat has for decades been shaped by singular talents like Mike Steiner? With an oeuvre that spans abstract painting, video art, and the orchestration of radical performance spaces, Mike Steiner embodies both the intellectual curiosity and relentless experimentation that define Berlin’s postwar artistic landscape.

Mike Steiner’s journey in the world of contemporary arts began early. Born in 1941 in Allenstein and raised in West Berlin, he joined the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung at the mere age of seventeen. Early evidence of his passion for artistic boundary-pushing appeared in paintings like "Stillleben mit Krug"—yet this was only the first chapter.

His formative years at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin brought him to the forefront of the capital's creative ferment. Even then, his circle included rising figures like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke—personalities whose approaches to abstract art and expressive gesture would synergize with Steiner’s own evolution. Not content with the prevailing conventions, Steiner regularly challenged stale artistic norms, a stance mirrored by contemporaries such as Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

Central to Steiner's development was his American interlude: thanks to a Ford Foundation scholarship, New York introduced him to the heart of the international avant-garde. Under the roof of Lil Picard, he moved among legends—he welcomed influences from Fluxus with Al Hansen, brushed shoulders with Allan Kaprow, and absorbed the environment of Robert Motherwell’s studio. This formative immersion catalyzed his pivotal break with traditional painting and the embrace of new, experimental media.

It was back in Berlin, however, where Mike Steiner’s true impact took root. In 1970, he established the now-iconic Hotel Steiner—immediately likened to New York’s Chelsea Hotel for its role as a crucible for creative minds. Here, a roster of artists as illustrious as Joseph Beuys found their Berlin home. The atmosphere was charged; late nights, spirited debates—a "Home far away from Home," in Lil Picard’s words. Soon after, Steiner launched the Studiogalerie, a hotspot for international Contemporary Arts Berlin, where the lines between visual art, performance, and video blurred to exhilarating effect.

Through the Studiogalerie, Mike Steiner galvanized Berlin’s nascent performing arts scene. He famously provided Agora-like conditions for Fluxus and Happenings—hosting and collaborating with Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, Valie Export, and Carolee Schneemann, among others. Not just a passive curator, Steiner operated the video camera, documenting performances such as Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body" and orchestrating legendary interventions like Ulay’s art-action "Irritation—Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst", a provocative removal of a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie.

What set Steiner apart was his role as both an artist and an enabler—an architect of rooms and relationships where new forms of art installation could flourish. This commitment positioned him, alongside figures like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, at the vanguard of European video art. Steiner’s archive—built piece by piece, starting with a 1974 tape by Reiner Ruthenbeck—grew into a singular testimony to the birth of moving-image art.

His own work, too, was fearless in crossing conventional boundaries. In the 1980s, he created "Painted Tapes", a unique fusion of video footage and painterly intervention, described as extending abstract paintings into the realm of the electronic. He harnessed video and sound, notably in music documentaries such as "Mojave Plan," following Tangerine Dream’s tour, and conceptualized these hybrid forms as a continuation of his painterly inquiry using new media.

The culminating affirmation of Mike Steiner’s stature came in 1999, when the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart—staged his major solo exhibition "Color Works". This survey illuminated his core strengths: the dialogue between color, space, and temporality, and his unwavering determination to test the expressive potential of contemporary art. The museum also became permanent custodian of his foundational video collection, enshrining his legacy at the center of Berlin’s cultural memory.

Throughout his career, Mike Steiner intersected with—and often anticipated—the trajectories of other seminal artists: he presaged the immersive video installations of Gary Hill, the genre-defying works of Jochen Gerz, and the performative radicalism of Valie Export and Marina Abramovi?. Unlike many, he actively fostered the collaborative energies that make performing arts and contemporary visual culture inseparable.

In his final years, having already left an indelible mark on both archival and living art practices, Mike Steiner returned to abstract painting and textile work. His late-phase abstract paintings exhibit a distilled simplicity and an intuitive command of color—echoes, perhaps, of his earliest passions revisited with the wisdom of a lifetime’s experiment.

All the while, the connective tissue in Mike Steiner’s work and curatorial projects lay in his belief in the generative power of networks, of artistic communities in flux. He was a relentless advocate for the new, for video as the medium not just of documentation but of creative transformation—an attitude now evident in major art collections and contemporary practice world-wide.

In the grand theater of contemporary art, Mike Steiner’s legacy is a living archive: a body of video, abstract paintings, and collaborative projects that continues to provoke, inspire, and expand the possibilities of artistic expression. Fascinatingly open-ended, his influence persists—at the Hamburger Bahnhof, in digital archives, and in the countless artists who found in his Berlin ventures a catalyst for their own breakthroughs.

For those who seek deeper insight into Mike Steiner’s art, visiting his official website or the holdings of the Hamburger Bahnhof offers a rare journey through the intersecting worlds of European avant-garde, abstract painting, and the genesis of video art. This is an invitation to dialogue, to discovery, and to the enduring allure of creativity without boundaries.