Mike Steiner and the Language of Contemporary Art: From Avant-Garde Video to Abstract Painting

Mike Steiner shaped contemporary art with an unparalleled blend of video, performance, and painting. His career exemplifies the restless drive of Berlin’s creative avant-garde.

Mike Steiner’s name is synonymous with the pulse of contemporary art in Berlin and well beyond. To encounter his work is to be invited into a world where boundaries between painting, video, and performance are unexpectedly fluid, ever-challenged and redefined. How does one artist traverse media so freely, while anchoring himself so deep within the narrative of art history?

Mike Steiner’s trajectory is one of constant innovation, closely intertwined with the evolution of contemporary arts in Berlin. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, Steiner’s early fascination with film during his Berlin school years set the course for a career that would come to span painting, video art, curation, and the creation of institutional spaces. Even before his 18th birthday, Steiner’s "Still Life with Jug" found its audience in the Great Berlin Art Exhibition—a sign of prodigious talent and an unwavering commitment to artistic exploration.

In the ferment of post-war Berlin, Steiner sought new vantage points for both living and making art. After formative studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, encounters with trailblazers like Hans Kuhn and exposure to the explosive art scenes of New York—where he met Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and Allan Kaprow—Steiner returned to Germany transformed by Fluxus, Pop Art, and the restless experimental spirit of the 1960s American avant-garde.

Steiner’s creative path is marked by the foundational role he played in shaping the infrastructure of the German and international art worlds. The legendary Hotel Steiner, established in 1970 near Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm and often compared to New York’s Chelsea Hotel, became a magnet for artists such as Joseph Beuys, Ulay, and international luminaries in performance and video art. Here, conversation, collaboration, and boundary-crossing became a way of life, fueling artistic invention in the heart of the city.

By the early 1970s, Steiner gravitated towards video as a radical new medium. Like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola—whose works would one day be part of Steiner’s own collection—he developed a pioneering approach that treated video not just as documentation, but as an expressive field in itself. Inspired by the Italian studio Art/Tapes/22, in 1974 he established the Studiogalerie as an independent hub for video, performance, and intermedial experimentation. The Studiogalerie opened its doors to feminist avant-garde artists: Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi? each found in Steiner’s Berlin an essential space for acts of liberation and audacity.

Steiner’s personal engagement with the moving image, as evidenced in actions like the infamous 1976 collaboration with Ulay (the staged "theft" of Carl Spitzweg’s "The Poor Poet" from the Neue Nationalgalerie), reflects his belief in art as an agent of provocation and cultural critique. Such projects—often blending performance, video, and institutional critique—secure his proximity not only to the Fluxus movement but also to the later works of conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth and Richard Serra, both present in his video archive.

His role as both creator and documentarian expanded the reach of contemporary arts in Berlin. The Videogalerie format (1985–1990), a boundary-pushing television show, positioned Steiner as a public intellectual and ambassador of the avant-garde—decades before the term “curator as artist” entered popular art discourse. Steiner’s media pieces, like his celebrated "Painted Tapes," fused painterly gesture with the temporality of video, forming a conceptual bridge between abstract painting and electronic image worlds reminiscent of the cross-disciplinary efforts of Gary Hill or Joan Jonas.

A landmark acknowledgment of his legacy came in 1999 with his large-scale solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, one of Berlin’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art. There, the "Color Works" series was presented not only as a summation of Steiner’s journey from informel painting to electronic abstraction, but as a statement about the ongoing interrelationship of color, time, and perception. To compare, only a few artists—among them Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke—have demonstrated such an enduring capacity for reinvention across genres and decades.

Equally significant is Steiner’s role as a collector and archivist. The Mike Steiner Videotape Collection, today housed at Hamburger Bahnhof and featuring works by Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, and international names like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, stands as a monument to the early history of video art. Through his collecting and curatorial efforts, Steiner helped inscribe the narratives of contemporary art practices into institutional memory.

Not content with existing media, Steiner’s later years witnessed a return to painting—yet always with the curiosity of one who never left experimentation behind. His "abstract paintings," produced from 2000 onwards, deploy intensely colored fields and often allude to the perceptual investigations he first rehearsed on video. Even in his last decade, fabric works and new installations extended his vocabulary, marking a restless search for the unexpected image.

Throughout his life, Mike Steiner’s artistic philosophy was rooted in openness—to media, to international dialogues, to uncertainty itself. The archive and legacy he left to Berlin are today more relevant than ever, offering proof that art’s role is not only to represent, but to reveal, disrupt, and reconnect.

A visit to the living digital archive of Mike Steiner—a journey through exhibitions at venues like Hamburger Bahnhof, documentations of his pioneering "Performing Arts" actions, and explorations of his "Art Installations"—reminds us what makes Steiner’s work a vital resource for anyone engaged with contemporary art. Berlin, through his eyes and actions, becomes again what it has always struggled to be: a laboratory for the new and the bold.

Kenner will recognize in Mike Steiner both a chronicler and an agent of change, one whose works in painting, video, and performance remain in dialogue with peers and successors alike—from Bruce Nauman to Joseph Beuys, from Gerhard Richter to Marina Abramovi?. Steiner’s practice represents not only a personal odyssey but a microcosm of Contemporary Arts Berlin: constantly shifting, persistently vital, and always open to reinvention.