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

Mike Steiner stands as a transformative figure in contemporary art, bridging painting, performance and video art to redefine the Berlin scene and beyond.

What makes Mike Steiner’s artistic legacy so striking in the landscape of contemporary art? Is it his restless search for new forms, or the persistent way he dissolved the boundaries between painting, performance and electronic media? In the world of Contemporary Arts Berlin, Steiner’s influence is deeply embedded—both as a pioneering creator and as a catalyst for others, forever marked by his restless curiosity and avant-garde courage.

From the earliest days of his creative life, Mike Steiner (Allenstein 1941 – Berlin 2012) made clear that he would not align himself with the expected trajectories of postwar German art. His roots in painting emerged during his youth in West-Berlin, already intersecting with investigation into film and photography. By 17, Steiner was exhibiting at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung—a prodigy both sensitive and provocative, his abstract paintings residing alongside the era’s major voices.

Yet it was his immersion into the international avant-garde, especially through formative years in New York, that set him apart. Steiner’s links with Lil Picard, Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow connected him to the very nerve centers of Fluxus and the emerging performance movement. Like Joseph Beuys or Nam June Paik, Steiner saw no clear dividing line between artistic disciplines, viewing the studio, hotel or gallery as equally valid theaters for creation.

The legend of Hotel Steiner, opened in 1970 near Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, stands as a symbol of his radically open ethos. Compared to Warhol’s Chelsea Hotel, it hosted major artists—Joseph Beuys, Arthur Köpcke, and Marina Abramovi? among them—and became a salon where ideas and collaborations flowed late into the night. It was here, and soon after in his Studiogalerie (founded 1974), that Steiner positioned himself at the crossroad of action and media, providing a space for performances and a professional base for the newly emerging world of video art.

Steiner’s technical inventiveness and commitment to collective practice shaped entire chapters of European multimedia and performance art. He facilitated projects for Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Carolee Schneemann, and worked closely with Marina Abramovi? and Ulay—most shockingly in the 1976 action where they staged the semi-illegal removal of Spitzweg’s „The Poor Poet" from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, documented by Steiner himself. The incident, titled "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” remains a touchstone in both performance and institutional critique.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Steiner’s artistic output was astonishingly diverse. While his early painting, informed by encounters with Robert Motherwell and Peter Hutchinson, exhibited elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, he never hesitated to “betray” painting for new technology. Works such as his "Painted Tapes" series embody the merger of analog and digital—the video tape becoming both medium and canvas, colored with the gestures of both painter and filmmaker.

The 1985-1990 television project "Videogalerie" illustrates Steiner’s iterative role as mediator and documentarian of art. Echoing Gerry Schum’s visionary TV gallery, Steiner produced and hosted over 120 segments, bringing video performance and artist interviews to German cable audiences. His approach anticipated today’s art livestreams—open, discursive, and ever-shifting from documentation to creative work itself.

One cannot overstate the importance of Steiner’s private archive and Berlin Video collection. The video holdings he assembled from 1974 onward—now largely held at the Hamburger Bahnhof Nationalgalerie—are a living history of Experimental and Performing Arts, encompassing pieces by Bill Viola, Richard Serra and Gary Hill, alongside rare Berlin actions and ephemeral works by Fluxus luminaries. This role as collector and chronicler places him in the immediate aesthetic and conceptual company of figures like Harald Szeemann and René Block, ensuring that much of contemporary art’s fleeting, performative edge survives beyond its moment of presentation.

Major solo exhibitions—foremost the 1999 “Color Works” show at Hamburger Bahnhof, and subsequent presentations at DNA Galerie, Oberhausen Gasometer, and internationally in Seoul and San Francisco—have highlighted the breadth of Steiner’s interdisciplinary practice. Yet even his last decades saw no slowdown in his innovation: after a stroke in 2006, Steiner turned increasingly to abstract paintings and textile works from his Berlin atelier, showing a late style marked by vibrant color and introspective calm.

Like Bruce Nauman and Allan Kaprow, Mike Steiner is a fulcrum for conversations around space, time, and artistic process. His contributions to the Performing Arts blur authorship and documentation. His interface of painting with the moving image pioneered a hybrid art that still inspires exhibitions and critical debate—his “Painted Tapes” prefiguring today’s multimedia installations.

Steiner's biography is a chronicle of movement between places and genres—between Allenstein, New York, and Berlin, from painting, to Super-8, photography, and copy-art, to the tactile and digital. A restless facilitator as well as an original artist, he championed others as vigorously as he championed his own vision, organizing symposiums, teaching in Berlin's art academies and serving as juror for international awards.

Today, his legacy is felt not only in the collections of major museums, but also in the ongoing activity around his archive and the renewed digital attention for his work. The ongoing fascination with Mike Steiner’s practice is a testament to the rarity and value of truly interdisciplinary thinking—a way of making art that is as much about resourcefulness, hospitality, and intellectual generosity as about finished works.

For those eager to experience the evolution of Contemporary Arts Berlin and understand the genealogy of European video and performance, it is essential to return to what Mike Steiner made possible. His oeuvre stands as a reminder that the best contemporary art resists stasis, continuing to question and reinvent itself with every medium, every encounter, every risk.

To delve deeper into Mike Steiner’s life and multifaceted body of work—including images, biographical texts, and exhibition history—visit the official website: Mike Steiner official artist page.

@ ad-hoc-news.de