Mike Steiner: The Visionary Trailblazer of Contemporary Art and Video Innovation

Mike Steiner revolutionized contemporary art with pioneering ventures in video, performance, and abstract painting. His legacy at Hamburger Bahnhof and in Berlin’s artscape continues to inspire and challenge.

Contemporary art, in all its expressive breadth and restless innovation, finds few protagonists as versatile and boundary-shattering as Mike Steiner. Known for his radical exploration of media and genres, Steiner’s work—spanning vibrant abstract paintings and experimental video—forever altered the very parameters of what art can be. What does it mean to transpose a painting’s stillness into the electrifying pulse of a moving image? Steiner spent decades providing answers to this question through an oeuvre that, to this day, pulses with urgency.

Mike Steiner’s artistic career is invariably tied to innovation and the unpredictable. While many artists find a medium and settle, he remained ever restless. Steiner began life in 1941 in Allenstein, growing up between the surviving years of postwar Berlin and the emergent spirit of artistic revolution. By his late teens, his painting showed at Berlin’s Große Berliner Kunstausstellung—an early hint at the recognition that would follow. Moving rapidly from painting to multimedia forms, Steiner’s story is also a story of contemporary arts Berlin, a city he would leave—and reclaim—in the rhythm of his own artistic quest.

His formative years in New York exposed him to artistic titans: under the roof of Lil Picard, amidst the avant-gardes of Pop Art, Fluxus, and Happenings, he befriended Al Hansen, met Allan Kaprow, and frequented Robert Motherwell’s studio. This cross-pollination of disciplines and attitudes became central to Steiner’s approach. It is no surprise that, upon his return to Berlin, he never saw art as a static pursuit. The Hotel Steiner he founded in 1970 soon earned its reputation as a modern echo of Warhol’s Chelsea Hotel—an incubator for exchange among artists like Joseph Beuys and Arthur Køpcke. This created the kind of heady, intellectual atmosphere that Steiner yearned for: a lived, breathing community of ideas.

Among his most enduring contributions, Steiner stands out as a pioneer of videokunst—the German word for video art. Inspired in part by trailblazers such as Michael Snow and Andy Warhol, he began creating his own video works around 1972 with Fluxus-legend Al Hansen in Italy’s visionary studio Art/Tapes/22. Disillusioned with the limitations of painting, Steiner discovered in video a radical new toolkit. With the opening of the Studiogalerie in Berlin (1974), he established a refuge for the contemporary avant-garde at a time when venues for such experimentation were rare in Germany’s capital. Here, Steiner not only made his own works but enabled others—providing equipment and a platform for future icons like Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Carolee Schneemann to realize epochal performances and video pieces.

Attention to performance and video art placed Steiner among the vanguard of contemporary practitioners. Critics and historians often bracket him with names such as Nam June Paik or Bill Viola, and yet Steiner’s perspective was unique: he was both a creator and an archiver. His productions didn’t merely capture events—they elevated the act of documentation into a performative gesture in its own right. As with the legendary event "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" (1976), where he documented Ulay’s audacious performance involving the ‘theft’ of a Spitzweg painting, Steiner’s lens interrogated the boundaries between art, law, and social context. It was a happening, a protest, an artwork, and a media spectacle rolled into one.

The variety of his artistic endeavours is staggering. In addition to video, Steiner continued to engage deeply with painting, installation, Copy Art, Minimal Art, and Hard Edge. His Painted Tapes, a series blending video footage and painting techniques, stand as a testament to his ceaseless urge to hybridize, to fuse the tactile with the ephemeral. These works, much like the interplay between sound and vision experienced in his collaborations with the legendary Tangerine Dream, embody Steiner’s vision: art as a field of endless intersections.

Steiner’s persistent experimentation mirrors the shifting currents of contemporary art worldwide. Like Joseph Beuys or Allan Kaprow—both of whom Steiner collaborated with or provided a platform for—he challenged hierarchies between artist and audience, artwork and observer, medium and message. Unlike Paik’s meditative use of the image or Viola’s sublime tableaux, Steiner’s videos more often vibrate with immediacy; they carry the atmosphere of the Berlin apartments and performative actions in which they were born. There’s a hum of life, of real-time urgency, underscoring his archive. His influential TV format, Die Videogalerie (1985–1990), beamed over a hundred editions of video art into German homes, further democratizing access and challenging the public’s expectations of Contemporary Arts Berlin.

It is no surprise, then, that Steiner’s life and output continue to reverberate through today’s discourse on art and media. The Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart recognized this with the major solo exhibition "COLOR WORKS" in 1999—a landmark, not just for its scale but for its acute focus on Steiner’s cross-disciplinary masterpieces. The museum is now the keeper of the Mike Steiner video collection, an essential archive featuring early works from stalwarts like Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Richard Serra. Some of this rich legacy resurfaced in 2011’s "Live to Tape", but much remains tantalizingly out of reach, not least due to challenges in digitization.

Reflecting on Steiner’s biography, one sees a man whose commitment to advancing the means of artistic production was equaled only by his generosity to peers. His practice was never insular—he lectured, curated, organized, produced, and tirelessly collected. Even after a stroke in 2006, he continued to work in his Berlin studio, turning renewed attention to abstract paintings and, in later years, textile works.

Today, Mike Steiner’s work claims its place among the boldest statements in postwar European art. His impact is visible in the ongoing dialogues about contemporary art installations, the fluidity between genres, and the very way in which we encounter time and action within art. Kenner schätzen besonders his unwavering belief in experimentation and the “liveness” of artistic exchange—a trait that ties him to the likes of Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, or even more recent figures working at the intersection of media and identity.

For anyone wishing to grasp the beating heart of contemporary visual culture or simply to let themselves be captivated by the radicality of Berlin’s postwar artscape, the work and archive of Mike Steiner are essential touchstones. For further information, images, and in-depth exploration, the official site visit the official Mike Steiner artist profile and archive here—and experience the legacy that continues to inspire, perplex, and embolden new generations.