Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: From Avant-garde Berlin to the Heart of the Moving Image

Mike Steiner shaped contemporary art, redefining painting and video alike. How did his artistic journey traverse performance, installation, and the moving image?

Mike Steiner is inextricably linked to the vibrant pulse of contemporary art in Berlin. As a pioneering force, his work cuts across painting, video, and curatorial innovation—making his legacy indispensable for understanding the shifting frontiers of European and global Contemporary Arts Berlin. What compels an artist to challenge the boundaries between abstract paintings and the ephemeral world of video? With Steiner, the answer is a dazzling narrative of experimentation and a sincere belief in art’s transformative potential.

The art of Mike Steiner is best approached as a living archive of post-war avant-garde. With roots in abstract painting, his early public appearance at Berlin’s Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959, aged just 17, marks the point of departure for a restless, transformative career. These were not the gestures of a timid beginner but the bold assertions of someone destined to impact the very definition of contemporary art.

Steiner’s paintings, rich in color and texture, at first align him with contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke. However, unlike many peers, he quickly embraced the allure of the moving image, becoming one of the first in Germany to fuse painting with video—a pioneering step that would see him compared, in spirit, to artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. His Painted Tapes, hybrid works blending video and painterly gestures, represent a distinct position at the intersection of media—anticipating today’s obsession with multimedia art installation.

The sheer scope of his output is staggering. The legendary Hotel Steiner, opened in 1970, functioned as more than an artists’ residence: it became Berlin’s answer to New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Visitors such as Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, and Valie Export animated its rooms with their artistic energy. Later, the Studiogalerie would become Berlin's hotbed for pioneering performance and video art—preceding even the global boom of art spaces dedicated to New Media.

By the mid-1970s, Steiner’s creative attention shifted compellingly towards video. Early collaborations with Fluxus legends like Al Hansen and his immersion in the Italian studio Art/Tapes/22 in 1974, enabled his “legitimacy crisis with painting” to evolve into rigorous innovation. This period birthed some of the earliest German art videos, integrating process, performance, and a deep concern for the documentation of fleeting artistic moments.

Perhaps most emblematic of his performative spirit is the 1976 action 'Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst', conceptualized with Ulay—the artist best known for his collaborations with Marina Abramovi?. In orchestrating the temporary removal of Spitzweg’s 'Der arme Poet' from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Steiner wasn’t staging a mere provocation: he was using art as an arena to question institutional boundaries and the sanctity of the artwork, a move reminiscent of works by Joseph Beuys and the provocative happenings of Yoko Ono. The documentation of this event as both performance and film testimony is an early form of what later theorists would call art installation or relational aesthetics.

The interplay between creation and curation defines much of Steiner’s middle period. As both a leading artist and a gallerist, he provided a critical platform for female pioneers like Marina Abramovi?, Carolee Schneemann, and Valie Export. The Studiogalerie, and its subsequent migration to Hotel Steiner, gave rise to some of the most influential performance art actions of the time. Steiner did not only champion these movements—he meticulously archived the events, understanding even then the fragile temporality of performance art.

The 1980s saw further innovation: his unique TV format 'Videogalerie' on Berlin Cable-Pilot, where Steiner produced, moderated, and presented more than 120 broadcasts, significantly widened the reach of video art. Few artists have blurred the line between public art mediation and cutting-edge authorship so effectively. This ambition placed Steiner in the same conversation as Gerry Schum and his visionary TV galleries, yet Steiner’s weekly cadence and inclusion of both international and local artists made his contribution uniquely sustainable.

Another noteworthy aspect of Mike Steiner's career is his role as a collector and chronicler. Over the decades, he amassed and meticulously catalogued an unprecedented archive of video art, featuring works from figures such as Bill Viola, Gary Hill, and Ulay. The donation of this collection to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, now housed at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, stands as a monumental testament to his belief in the enduring power of the moving image, as well as his keen curatorial foresight.

His greatest solo exhibition—Color Works—was celebrated in 1999 at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, a singular honor in the context of contemporary German art history. Here, his long arc from painting to electronic media was reframed as a seamless trajectory rather than mere category-shifting. Critics and visitors alike saw the visionary nature of Steiner’s oeuvre: an interplay between material process, color experimentation, and an unwavering curiosity for artistic innovation.

Comparisons with his international contemporaries—such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Valie Export—underline both the originality and the connectedness of Steiner’s approach to the contemporary. These artists share a radical commitment to performance, time, and space, yet Steiner’s uniquely Berlin-based sensibility infuses the work with a distinctly German postwar energy.

As the new millennium dawned, Mike Steiner returned—perhaps inevitably—to abstraction, reengaging with the painterly medium that first defined his public career, while also producing textile works. This late phase, still little explored, reveals a circle completed: a restless search for artistic language never satisfied, always in motion.

Mike Steiner remains a lodestar for anyone seeking the origins and trajectories of contemporary art in Berlin. His works, preserved yet not entirely digitized, stand as a reminder of the flux and fragility inherent in performance and media art. Fascinatingly, even a decade after his passing, his animated archive and preserved installations continue to inspire artists, performers, and curators worldwide.

To delve further into the works, videos, and rare documents of Mike Steiner, a visit to his official site is highly recommended.

Today, as Berlin’s art landscape reinvents itself yet again, Mike Steiner’s legacy offers both a roadmap and a touchstone—a testament to the power of ongoing artistic inquiry, collaboration, and innovation in the ever-shifting world of contemporary art.