Mike Steiner – Shaping Contemporary Art with Avant-Garde Vision and Experimental Spirit

With his immersive media experiments and pivotal role in Berlin's avant-garde, Mike Steiner is a defining figure of contemporary art whose impact echoes from painting to video installations.

When one steps into the world of Mike Steiner, the boundaries of contemporary art seem to dissolve. His vision refracts Berlin’s cultural history through experimental forms: from abstract paintings rich in color theory to pioneering video installations and performative interventions. What does it mean to push at the limits of image, time, and media? With Mike Steiner, each work resonates as an open question – inviting viewers to rethink what art can be.

At the heart of Mike Steiner’s oeuvre lies an invigorating cross-pollination of artistic media. Initially making waves as a painter in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was soon drawn into the centrifugal forces of Fluxus, Pop Art, and international performance movements. Even as a young artist, his abstract paintings courted attention in Berlin’s renowned Große Berliner Kunstausstellung and later in Paris, Mailand, and Geneva, alongside figures like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. Yet Steiner’s curiosity would not be confined to canvas alone.

It was in New York, under the guidance of art luminaries such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Al Hansen, that Mike Steiner’s practice expanded significantly. Engaging directly with the city’s vibrant avant-garde circles, including Allan Kaprow—the inventor of Happenings—and Pop luminaries like Robert Motherwell, Steiner reimagined the possibilities of art. This confluence between painting and performance, so central to contemporary arts in Berlin, would define his path.

Steiner’s legendary Hotel Steiner and the later Studiogalerie became hubs for artists from across the globe—places likened to New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Within these walls, conversations about art swirled late into the night, and the space itself served as a generator of creative energy. Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and international icons flocked here, reaffirming Steiner’s role as a catalyst for experimental culture in Berlin. The Studiogalerie, established in 1974, was an independent, international forum where video, performance and the avant-garde found fertile ground.

Mike Steiner was one of the very first to champion video as a legitimate medium of artistic expression in Germany. By the mid-1970s, his skepticism about painting’s limits drew him ever deeper into time-based art. He recognized—like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola in the US—the immense potential of recorded image and action. The Studiogalerie equipped young artists, including the INTERMEDIA group, with precious video technology and a venue for production, exhibition and discourse. It offered Berlin a counterpart to what Wulf Herzogenrath was pioneering in Cologne, ushering in a new era of Berlin-based video artistry.

Standout works from this transformative period include collaborations with Fluxus artists and conceptual projects documented on tape—experiments which anticipated multimedia practices by decades. Performances by Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Carolee Schneemann found a home at Steiner’s Studiogalerie, their ephemeral gestures preserved through his lens. Notably, his documentation of Marina Abramovi?’s legendary “Freeing the Body” and Ulay’s audacious art intervention at the Neue Nationalgalerie—known as "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst” (1976)—became milestones in the history of performance art, establishing Berlin as a crucible of radical artistic inquiry.

Steiner also ventured into the territory of installation art and photographic series, as seen in the later “Painted Tapes”—where the painterly gesture meets the flickering screen. This hybridization, blending painting with electronic media, echoes the approaches of international contemporaries like Bruce Nauman or Gary Hill, situating Steiner among the global pioneers of media art.

Throughout the late 1980s, Steiner’s engagement with video matured into his innovative television show, “Videogalerie,” which aired over 120 episodes presenting video art to a broad public—an echo and extension of Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie. By demystifying the medium through TV, Steiner profoundly shaped the landscape of Performing Arts and video culture, not just in Berlin, but across all of Germany.

The importance of his vision is underscored by the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, which honored his work with a major solo exhibition in 1999. This show, COLOR WORKS, foregrounded Steiner’s consistently genre-defying practice—oscillating between color field abstraction and electronic image, a dialogue between tradition and innovation. His extensive video collection, gifted to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and housed today at the Hamburger Bahnhof, is a living archive of contemporary video and performance art. It preserves early works by artists ranging from Ulay and Marina Abramovi? to Richard Serra, Bill Viola, George Maciunas and Nam June Paik—testament to Steiner’s influence as a curator, collector and participant within Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Biographically, Steiner’s life resonates with the energy and contradictions of postwar Berlin—a city reinventing itself. Born in East Prussia in 1941, refugeed during WWII, and raised in West Berlin, he absorbed influences from both the European postwar avant-garde and New York’s Pop and Fluxus circles. His academic foundation at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, and mentorships under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, provided technical bedrock, yet Steiner soon charted his own course. A Ford Foundation fellowship took him to the United States, where he mingled with avant-garde leaders and built a transatlantic network that would serve him throughout his life.

Above all, Mike Steiner’s artistic philosophy is one of permeability: a deliberate crossing of boundaries—between painting and video, curation and creation, archive and action. He was not only a maker, but also a documentarian and transmitter: preserving fleeting artistic moments for future generations. His work with the Technische Universität Berlin, and a host of lectures and juries, reflected a deep commitment to teaching and transmission within the performing and visual arts. In his late career, abstract paintings and fabric works reaffirmed his belief in the generative power of color, chance, and material encounter.

What remains most impressive about Steiner is his relentless curiosity and willingness to embrace the unknown—a principle that links him with avant-garde contemporaries like Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, or Bruce Nauman. Each of his works, whether a painterly abstraction or a videotaped Happening, asks viewers to leave comfort zones and participate in the improvisational logic of art. His impact reverberates in Berlin’s artistic community and the archives of the Hamburger Bahnhof, confirming him as a central figure of late 20th-century innovation.

For anyone invested in the evolution of contemporary art—whether through the lens of performance, abstract painting, or media installation—Mike Steiner offers a rich terrain for exploration. His archive and collection, much of it still awaiting digitization, stands as an open invitation to artists and audiences alike: to revisit questions of image, memory, and artistic community anew.

If you seek a deeper understanding of contemporary artistic trajectories, make sure to consult the extensive resources and image galleries at Mike Steiner’s official artist page. There, the layering of times, media, and influences is not just a matter of biography but a living presence—awaiting discovery.