Mike Steiner: Visionary of Contemporary Art and Multimedia Innovation

Mike Steiner stands as a pivotal figure in contemporary art, bridging avant-garde painting and groundbreaking videography. His influence reaches from Berlin's cultural heart to the global stage.

For decades, the name Mike Steiner has meant boundary-pushing contemporary art—his vision reconciling painting, performance, and, perhaps most strikingly, the nascent field of video art. How does one redefine the dialog between time, space, and image? In Mike Steiner’s world, these are not just academic questions, but the pulse of a singular, restless exploration. The trace of his hand may be seen as much in the silent authority of his abstract paintings as in the flickering immediacy of his tapes, weaving an ever-renewed fabric between viewers and art’s elusive core.

To understand Mike Steiner, one must traverse the many landscapes of his artistic involvement—from the first appearances as a painter at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in the late 1950s, to his seminal influence on Berlin’s performing and visual arts culture throughout the 1970s and beyond. Steiner’s trajectory glimmers with risk and reinvention, marked by technical innovation and marked personal commitment to the communities that shaped contemporary arts in Berlin.

Steiner's Hamburg Bahnhof solo exhibition in 1999 stands as a defining moment, not only in his career, but also in the history of Contemporary Arts Berlin. The exhibition "Color Works" presented an overview of his relentless crossing of boundaries: painting, video, installation—interlaced in a vibrant symphony. Few artists have traversed so fluidly and authoritatively between media, and fewer still have anchored their multifaceted journey in such historical junctures as those that shaped Steiner’s Berlin. The Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, with its vast industrial spaces, was the ideal site for Steiner’s large-scale installations and colored tapes, and the resonance of that exhibition is still palpable in the city’s creative memory.

The early years saw Steiner increasingly drawn into the Berlin avant-garde: he founded the legendary Hotel Steiner as a haven for artists, echoing the spirit of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, and soon after created the Studiogalerie—a crucible for experimental practice and a nexus for international artists. These venues were where he first championed Fluxus and performance art, turning Berlin into a welcoming stage for artists like Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Marina Abramovi?, Ulay, and even legends such as Allan Kaprow and Ben Vautier. Steiner was not just a host, but an active participant and instigator, curating, producing, and occasionally performing in multimedia events that stretched the limits of artistic convention.

His embrace of video—then a brand-new artistic medium—was more than ambition; it was a turning point. Influenced by encounters in New York and the experimental energies of Berlin, Steiner’s pioneering ‘Videogalerie’ (1985–1990) production for Berlin television brought Video Art into German living rooms and sparked a new wave of dialogue about the moving image in art. His massive collection of tapes and documentation—now housed by Hamburger Bahnhof as the Berlin Video and Sammlung Mike Steiner—remains a towering archive of the era’s innovation, featuring works by figures such as Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, and Richard Serra alongside his German contemporaries.

In comparison with other leading contemporary artists, Mike Steiner’s work reflects the international dialogue of his time. While Joseph Beuys blended performance, pedagogy, and participation, Steiner focused more intently on the dynamic interplay between traditional media (notably in his abstract paintings) and emergent technologies. Where Marina Abramovi? sought out the transformative moment within the self, Steiner’s tapes and installations often circled around the collective, the ephemeral, and an archival impulse—an effort reminiscent of video pioneer Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow’s happenings, albeit with a distinctly Berlin accent. His "Painted Tapes"—a radical fusion of video and paint—pushed this dialogue even further, questioning where analytical boundaries ought to dissolve.

Steiner’s biography reads as a litany of gains and pivots, often catalyzed by new environments and relationships: his early brush with the American art scene while staying with Lil Picard, his cross-pollinations during periods in New York and Berlin, his close collaborations with the likes of Ulay (as memorably staged in the 1976 performative art theft "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst"), and his restless experimentation with photo, copy art, Super-8 film, and multi-panel installations.

As a teacher and advocate, Steiner left a mark on generations, curating, nurturing, and promoting video and performance art in an often skeptical Germany. Even after a debilitating stroke in 2006, he continued to work, shifting his focus toward abstract paintings and textile works. These late works—concise, poetic, traversing surface and depth—reveal an artist ever attuned to the metaphysical potential of color and structure. Critics and aficionados alike have noted the lyrical, sometimes almost musical, intensity of his canvases, their attunement to a history of abstraction yet decisively of the present moment.

Philosophically, Mike Steiner was never about mere spectacle. The performances he enabled, the installations he realized, the subtle intermedia experiments he conducted—all were grounded in a faith in art’s capacity to interrogate, to disrupt, and ultimately to connect. His tenure as an educator and his tireless archiving work suggest a vision that was always collective, always aiming to expand the domain of what could be seen, heard, or experienced as art.

Today, Mike Steiner’s influence persists as both a presence and a provocation. For those tracing the lines of contemporary art, Steiner is an indispensable reference—a unique voice who counterposed the intellectual rigor of conceptual art with the tactile immediacy of the performative and the visual. His restless joy of experiment—a joy echoed both in his Club-like studios and in his international forays—remains inspirational.

In an age marked by rapid media evolution and shifting perceptions of authorship and authenticity, Steiner’s legacy as an artist, curator, and collector feels more, not less, relevant. Engaging with his art is to be invited into a living conversation about time, community, and the art of documentation.

For those wishing to delve deeper into his remarkable journey, a visit to his official website or the viewing of his works in the collections of Hamburger Bahnhof is emphatically recommended. There, one can sense the tremendous breadth of Mike Steiner’s creative output and encounter contemporary art at its most vital, questioning, and alive.