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

Mike Steiner reshaped contemporary art through cross-media innovation. His legacy in Berlin's avant-garde – from painting to video, from Hamburger Bahnhof to enduring influence – marks him as a singular visionary.

Can one truly grasp the pulse of contemporary art without encountering the formidable influence of Mike Steiner? His artistic energy – both experimental and analytical – pulses through the veins of Berlin’s creative scene, challenging conventional form and chronicle with every work. From evocative abstract paintings to groundbreaking performances and an unrivaled contribution to the development of Video Art, Mike Steiner’s oeuvre navigates the fragile boundaries between image, action, and the space in-between.

What makes Steiner’s work so compelling is its refusal to settle. Early encounters with painting set the stage, but soon he plunged into the realms of video, performance, and curatorial practice. An artistic chameleon, his trajectory spanned not just genres but entire philosophies. He is as much a chronicler as he is a creator – meticulously recording ephemeral performance moments, then returning to the canvas with renewed intensity.

Across decades, Steiner’s multifaceted development becomes a mirror of contemporary arts in Berlin. In the 1960s, his paintings were shown alongside influential artists like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, placing him at the heart of Germany’s emerging avant-garde. Yet Steiner’s artistic thirst pushed further. Through formative encounters in New York with figures such as Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen and Lil Picard, Steiner absorbed the currents of Fluxus, Pop, and Happening art – movements that would forever shape how he understood artistic action.

Unlike many contemporaries, Steiner transformed his own spaces into laboratories for innovation: the legendary Hotel Steiner became Berlin’s own answer to the Chelsea Hotel, gathering artists such as Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, and Carolee Schneemann for boundary-defying collaborations. It was here, and in his subsequent Studiogalerie, that the intersection of art, social experiment, and technological curiosity came to full bloom. The Studiogalerie, founded in 1974, became an incubator for emerging video and performance art, supporting not only Steiner’s own work but also offering vital resources to artists like Marina Abramovi?, Ulay and the feminist avant-garde. These Berlin institutions are woven into the very fabric of European performing arts and multimedia innovation.

Fascinating is Steiner’s transition from painting to video. Confronted by what he termed a "crisis of legitimacy" in painting, he harnessed new media not as a supplement but as a potent artistic language in itself. His first video works, created abroad in Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 studio, echo the restless drive of contemporaries like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola. Yet Steiner's approach remains distinctly his own – a sensitivity to material, time, and gesture runs throughout, whether the medium is oils, Polaroid strips, or the flicker of cathode rays. The celebrated series Painted Tapes, fusing painting with electronic video frames, exemplifies this unique interplay, generating visual worlds that are at once meditative and vibrantly disruptive.

Steiner’s largest solo exhibition, COLOR WORKS 1995–1998 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in 1999, crowned his polymathic oeuvre. Displayed in the hallowed halls of Germany’s most important contemporary art museum, the show presented not just paintings but an expansive vision of art’s possibilities. Here, abstraction and video merged seamlessly, testimony to a lifetime spent bending genre and media to expressive purpose. Compare this with institutional retrospectives like those given to Bruce Nauman or Marina Abramovi? – similarly omnivorous in media, but Steiner’s Berlin-centric context grounded his art in social history and local experimentation.

Always working between system and spontaneity, Mike Steiner championed not just the production of art, but its documentation and mediation. His extensive archive – bequeathed to Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and housed today at the Hamburger Bahnhof – represents one of Europe’s most significant collections of video and performance documentation, including seminal works by Ulay, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Gary Hill, and others. In this way, Steiner is part-artist, part-archivist: his passion ensured the fleeting miracle of live art would not simply vanish into memory. His TV project Videogalerie (1985–1990), a pioneering broadcast format introducing dozens of artists and performative works to the broader public, broke new ground in accessibility, predating today’s digital democratization of art by decades.

Technically, Steiner traversed an ever-widening field: from Super-8 film and minimalist abstractions to complex installations and the playful manipulations of copy art and slide series. His lyrical abstract paintings of the 2000s, created in profound solitude in his Berlin studio, reveal a searching, gestural hand – deeply contemporary yet imbued with a sense of personal history. Recent exhibitions, such as "AUGENFUTTER BILDERFRESSER – from tape to paint" (GALVANO ART GALLERY, Leipzig, 2023), reaffirm the enduring appeal of his cross-media approach and continued relevance for younger generations of artists seeking to explode traditional boundaries.

Biographically, Mike Steiner embodies the postwar story of Berlin as a perpetual crucible for artistic experiment. Born in Allenstein in 1941 and raised in the divided capital, Steiner’s educational roots at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin provided the formal foundation. Yet it was the friction and allure of transatlantic exchange – so central to contemporary arts in Berlin, as well as to Steiner’s own orbit – that galvanized his creative and communal instincts. Encounters with American and European avant-gardes, mentorships with figures like Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, and the cosmopolitan salon-life of postwar Berlin all fueled a vision of art as process, happening, and never-ending dialogue.

Philosophically, Steiner was tireless in his advocacy for experimentation. He recognized early the necessity of cross-pollination among disciplines and the importance of collective artistic spaces. It’s no wonder his circles overlapped with visionaries such as Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas—thinkers equally invested in art’s social dimension and transformative power. Steiner’s restless curiosity, his willingness to rethink the possibilities of medium and context, mark him as a precursor to contemporary practices now considered standard: multimedia installation, participatory performance, and the merging of archival research with creative production. In this, he stands with other giants of innovation, from Bruce Nauman’s performative installations to Allan Kaprow’s happenings, yet always with a Berlin accent, a sense of playful seriousness, and a penchant for the uncanny.

Today, more than a decade after his passing, Mike Steiner remains a vital force. His name is synonymous with Berlin’s explosion of contemporary arts, but it equally resonates in broader conversations about how we record, witness, and reimagine the role of the artist. To visit his work – whether in the archives of Hamburger Bahnhof or in the ever-evolving online galleries – is to encounter the pulse of an era still unfolding.

It is no exaggeration to claim Mike Steiner was, and remains, one of the most important catalysts for contemporary art, both in Berlin and beyond. Those new to his œuvre are advised: do not simply read about the work. Engage it—see, hear, and feel the convergence of materials, times, and minds. For those hungry for deeper immersion, the official website, Mike Steiner – Contemporary Arts Berlin Archive, offers a treasure trove of images, documents, and insight for every level of enthusiast. The living history of contemporary arts in Berlin bears his signature at every turn – an invitation to question, to experiment, and to remember.