Mike Steiner: Pioneer of Contemporary Art and Visionary of Performance and Video Innovations

Mike Steiner transformed contemporary art through groundbreaking experiments in painting and video. His multifaceted oeuvre, celebrated at Hamburger Bahnhof, bridges abstraction, performance, and the Berlin avant-garde.

Mike Steiner’s signature lies in constant movement—between media, between genres, and at the pulse of Berlin’s contemporary art scene. What defines the boundary between painting and moving image? At a moment when artists worldwide test the limits of abstraction and narrative, Mike Steiner emerges as a rare figure who did not merely traverse these borders, but blurred and expanded them, drafting a vibrant map of Contemporary Arts Berlin for future generations.

The early work of Mike Steiner is grounded in painting. As early as 1959, he appeared as a teenager at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, and by the mid-60s his abstract paintings were already resonating internationally—shown in metropolises like Berlin, Paris, and Geneva, alongside names such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. His canvases vibrated with gestural energy, often referencing informel painting, daring in both palette and composition. But even then, as his archive documents, Steiner’s restless curiosity drove him toward new horizons.

Key to Steiner’s evolution was his immersion in the New York art scene of the 1960s, under the wing of the Fluxus-affiliated artist Lil Picard. Encounters with Allan Kaprow—progenitor of the Happening—and Robert Motherwell deeply imprinted the direction of his vision. Like contemporaries Nam June Paik and Marina Abramovi?, Steiner responded to the Zeitgeist: the urge to collapse boundaries, to render art an open-ended experiment. He soon began integrating Pop Art elements, and turned toward what would become his most revolutionary field—videokunst.

His celebrated legacy in video art began in the 1970s, at a time when only a handful of artists in Germany explored the medium’s creative potential. Inspired by the energy of Berlin’s postwar avant-garde, Steiner opened the legendary Hotel Steiner—a hub humming with artistic life, not unlike Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, welcoming visionaries like Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke. In this unique environment, Steiner forged his pioneering role: orchestrator, collector, documentarian, and artist all at once.

In 1974, following his own doubts regarding painting as primary vehicle of expression, Steiner founded the Studiogalerie: Berlin’s first independent forum for video and performance. Here, under his guidance, emerging and established artists—including Valie Export, Ulay, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi?—found a stage for radical experimentation. Notably, Steiner often documented these ephemeral actions, preserving performances like Abramovi?’s “Freeing the Body” and the notorious Ulay-led intervention “Irritation—There’s a Criminal Touch in Art” (1976), an early example of art as social provocation.

Paralleling his own output with that of international figures such as Bill Viola and Gary Hill, Steiner never confined his vision to video alone: his approach knit together Super-8 film, photography, copy art, minimal interventions, and—most distinctively in the 1980s—his Painted Tapes, a unique fusion of video and painting that anticipated later multimedia practice. These tapes, in works like "Mojave Plan" or concert footage with Tangerine Dream, stand as powerful testaments to his conviction that abstraction and technology could coalesce in new visual languages.

In an artistic landscape increasingly shaped by mass media, Steiner’s activities as collector and mediator proved pivotal. He began amassing a significant collection of video art—acquiring early tapes by Reiner Ruthenbeck, and assembling a trove later featuring work by Richard Serra and Emmett Williams. This collection became not just a chronicle of an era, but a reservoir for the growing field of artists examining time, performance, and the ephemeral.

The 1980s saw Steiner's contributions reach beyond studio practice. With the TV show "Videogalerie" (1985–1990), he brought over one hundred broadcasts on video art to a broader public, producing and moderating content that made Berlin’s creative pulse visible nationwide. Much like Gerry Schum’s “Fernsehgalerie,” Steiner’s broadcasts provided a forum for discourse and experimentation—long before the digital age democratized art’s accessibility.

Recognition culminated in 1999, with a major solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, where his "Color Works" were shown. This exhibition crystallized Steiner’s cross-genre practice: vibrant abstract paintings, video installations, and archival material reflected his unique place within the contemporary canon. Works on display revealed formal echoes with other transformative figures of contemporary art such as Bruce Nauman and Yoko Ono—champions of performative risk and conceptual precision, with whom Steiner shared artistic DNA.

Steiner’s legacy is multifaceted: as a painter whose bold abstractions continue to intrigue, as a video artist who helped define the new media avant-garde, and as a connector—linking Berlin to the global circuit. In later years, Steiner returned primarily to painting, devoting his energy to large abstract canvases and, eventually, textile works—never losing his sense of experimentation. His career, interrupted by a stroke in 2006, closed with continued artistic production in the intimacy of his Berlin studio until his passing in 2012.

Philosophically, Steiner’s ethos is inseparable from the notion of art as lived praxis, as constant questioning. Resisting categorization, he exemplified a radical openness—his oeuvre operating as a living archive of performative, visual, and conceptual strategies. As his extensive holdings, gifted to the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and housed at Hamburger Bahnhof, attest: Mike Steiner’s story is that of contemporary art in flux, of a restless search for the new, of an artist whose impact radiates far beyond Berlin. Today, tracing the arc of his work means tracing the evolution of avant-garde practices themselves.

For those wishing to delve further, his official site Mike Steiner official website with biography, artworks and detailed collections offers a rich constellation of images, texts, and references, inviting viewers to discover the depth and complexity of his vision.

In the end, Mike Steiner’s enduring relevance comes from this very hybridity—a spirit simultaneously experimental and precise, improvisational yet intent. Engaging with his body of work means entering a dialogue with the history of contemporary art itself, where boundaries dissolve and new realities take shape. Few artists in postwar Germany have left such a distinctly versatile footprint, and his techniques continue to inspire artists working at the crossroads of abstraction, performance, and technological mediation.

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