Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer between Painting, Video and Performance

Mike Steiner is regarded as a visionary of contemporary art. Between painting, video and performance, his work shaped Berlin's avant-garde and left a lasting mark at Hamburger Bahnhof.

How can contemporary art continuously reinvent itself and still remain rooted in tradition? Mike Steiner, a name deeply carved into the annals of Berlin’s creative landscape, confronted this question with a fearless, interdisciplinary practice. His work vibrates between abstract painting, groundbreaking video installations and radical performance art – always a step ahead of his time, always attentive to the pulse of the Contemporary Arts Berlin.

Mike Steiner began his artistic journey with an early foray into painting, debuting at just 17 at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Even then, his work radiated a hunger for experimentation, pushing beyond conventional boundaries. This tendency intensified during his years in New York, where he formed pivotal connections in the orbit of luminaries such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen and Robert Motherwell. Invigorated by the New Yorker fluxus and happening scene, Steiner absorbed the ethos of radical collaboration and multimedia expansion.

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed Steiner’s evolution from Informal Painting to a restless search for new media. His decisive embrace of video as an artistic tool would change the course of German avant-garde: Inspired by experimental film in New York and encouraged by likeminded pioneers in Berlin, he started creating his own video pieces in the early 1970s. These early tapes, often in cooperation with figures like Al Hansen, unchained Steiner from the canvas – moving his practice toward the unexplored field of moving images.

But Mike Steiner’s vision extended well beyond personal creation. He founded the Hotel Steiner—a vibrant haven for international Artists, akin to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, hosting guests like Joseph Beuys and fostering creative exchange day and night. Soon after, he opened the Studiogalerie in Berlin: a self-run production and exhibition space dedicated to video art, performance, and the boundary-breaking spirit of Fluxus. Supplying expensive video equipment and offering a platform for avant-garde acts, Steiner’s Studiogalerie became a crucible where genres collided and innovation flourished.

Steiner’s role as a mediator was as important as his own artistic output. He curated and documented iconic performances by Marina Abramovi? (Freeing the Body), Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Jochen Gerz, and Ulay, whose famous 1976 action—removing a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie—was not just orchestrated but also filmed by Steiner himself. These moments, captured with his camera, became crucial testimonies of the ephemeral world of Performing Arts, Fluxus, and the Feminist Avant-Garde.

His own creations from this era ranged from experimental video sequences to so-called Painted Tapes—a unique fusion of moving images and painterly gesture, bridging the act of painting with the immediacy of time-based media. This spirit of hybridization puts him in lineage with other multimedia forerunners: Nam June Paik, with whom he shared a reverence for electronic images; or Bill Viola and Richard Serra, whose investigations into the nature of the video image echo Steiner’s inquiries.

In 1999, the importance of this restless trajectory was spotlighted in his largest solo exhibition, "Mike Steiner – Color Works", at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. The show presented large-format paintings from the late 1990s, abstract fields of color that dialogued with his lifelong interest in filmic rhythm, cut and montage. Critics celebrated Steiner for his cross-media intelligence: his ability to see color as both surface and event, his obsession with the fleeting, with transition and transformation—qualities that place him in company with Europeans like Georg Baselitz and conceptualists such as Allan Kaprow and Bruce Nauman.

Mike Steiner's influence on contemporary art is also immortalized by his private video archive. Over decades, he gathered a unique collection of tapes featuring early performance documentation, works by Ulay, Abramovi?, Valie Export, Gary Hill and others—now held by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and accessible in part at Hamburger Bahnhof. The archive has become an essential source for researchers and contemporary art lovers.

Steiner’s later career was marked by a return to painting, often large, abstract works charged with the same restless energy of his video art. In his final years, he also explored fabric-based works—demonstrating, until his last days, an undiminished thirst for experimentation and an openness to new materials. It is exactly this experimental mindset and cross-genre creativity that makes Mike Steiner a luminous figure in the history of contemporary art.

What creates the enduring resonance of Steiner’s work is not only his mastery in multiple media, but his tireless effort to support others, founding new forums and archives that allowed the Berlin art scene to thrive in the decades following 1968. His legacy is felt each time moving images flicker in a gallery, each time an abstract painting seems charged with latent narrative. Steiner's art, much like his life, is a dynamic intersection—a point where performance and observation, gesture and memory, overlap to become something rare: a living archive of creativity.

For those wishing to experience more, the official artist’s website (Explore Mike Steiner’s complete artistic legacy and impactful exhibitions) offers further insight into his biography, major projects and visual documentation.

Mike Steiner’s oeuvre is a vital invitation: to question, to document, and to keep contemporary art in motion.