Mike Steiner – Contemporary Art Pioneer: From Berlin Avantgarde to Global Video Art

Mike Steiner stands as a visionary in contemporary art, bridging Berlin's avantgarde with international movements. His groundbreaking work spans painting, performance, and epoch-defining videotapes.

How can one artist spark an entire era of contemporary art and still leave room for new discoveries? Mike Steiner’s boundary-shifting body of work, anchored in Berlin’s vibrant art scene, dares to redraw the lines between painting, performance, and moving image. His legacy is an open invitation: look closely, and the narratives, the colors, and the cinematic flow reveal a pioneering vision of European modernity.

Mike Steiner’s unmistakable mark on contemporary art began early. Born in 1941 in Allenstein, he soon gravitated towards the freedoms of visual expression that Berlin in the post-war period offered. As a teenager, his painting debuted at the renowned Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (1959), foreshadowing a restless urge to experiment that would define his whole artistic trajectory. Steiner’s works are characterized by a keen sensitivity to color, space, and temporality—whether rendered through oil on canvas, electronic video, or the choreography of live performance.

By the late 1960s, Steiner’s education at Berlin’s Hochschule für bildende Künste, under the mentorship of Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, brought him alongside peers like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke to the forefront of a new German Expressionism. Yet even then, the seeds of dissatisfaction with traditional painting were taking root. Encounters with American avantgarde legends such as Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Motherwell during his New York sojourn ignited his passion for the radical, ephemeral spirit of Fluxus and Happening art.

The real turning point was Steiner’s embrace of video. In the early 1970s, inspired by collaborations with Fluxus friends like Al Hansen and dialog with legends such as Allan Kaprow, Steiner realized the full transformative potential of electronic media. His earliest video works, created at the legendary Studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, reflect this spirit of invention and a desire to push the material boundaries of art. This period of creative ferment birthed the pioneering 'Studiogalerie' in Berlin—a hub for performance and video art that would shape the era’s Contemporary Arts Berlin.

What made Steiner different from contemporaries like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola was not just his choice of medium, but his instinct for convergence. His Studios in Berlin hosted artists like Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, and Ulay—each pushing the body, voice, and image beyond the conceivable. Performances such as Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body" (1976) were often both produced and video-documented by Steiner himself. Perhaps most legendary, his orchestrated 'art theft' with Ulay, removing Spitzweg's "Der arme Poet" from the Neue Nationalgalerie, blurred the lines between performance, activism, and provocative social critique—recalling the immersive, boundary-questioning ethos of Joseph Beuys.

As his influence grew, Mike Steiner’s own practice expanded. The late 1970s and 1980s saw his works become more intermedial—uniting video, Super 8 film, photography, and hard-edge abstraction. A signature achievement: the "Painted Tapes," which merged video materiality with painterly gesture, acting as a vibrant dialogue between static and moving images. This period also marked his commitment as a collector and curator. His Video Art collection became one of the era’s defining archives, later entrusted to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and now housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

In 1999, the full scope of Steiner's innovation was celebrated in the major solo exhibition "Color Works" at Hamburger Bahnhof, confirming his place beside international icons of contemporary art such as Bruce Nauman or Gary Hill. His archive—comprising early video works by Ulay, Bill Viola, Jochen Gerz, George Maciunas, and many more—speaks to his role as both catalyst and chronicler of performance and media art developments in Berlin and beyond.

Yet, for all his achievements in technical innovation and archiving, it is the depth of artistic inquiry that resonates most. In his later years, especially after 2000, Steiner devoted himself anew to abstract painting and textile-based works, blending lyrical introspection with hard-won visual economy. His color field paintings, often large-scale and vibrantly layered, reveal a meditative engagement with perception and emotion. Here, echoes of Gerhard Richter’s abstraction or the contemplative minimalism of Agnes Martin may gently flicker—but always refracted through Steiner’s utterly personal vocabulary.

The formative years—marked by the creation of iconic spaces like Hotel Steiner (an avant-garde counterpart to New York's Chelsea Hotel) and the Studiogalerie—established Steiner as a central node in the network of international and German contemporary artists. His activities shaped not just the careers of fluxus luminaries, but Berlin’s reputation as a convulsive, boundary-pushing city of the performing arts and contemporary experimentation.

Steiner's relentless curiosity pushed him to explore new conceptual territories. Whether through curating the broadcast TV-format "Videogalerie" (1985–1990), traveling globally to document art scenes, or mentoring emerging talents through workshops and juries, his life was lived in the service of artistic connection and innovation.

Fascinatingly, Steiner did not rest on institutional recognition or market validation. His later years, working quietly in his Berlin studio after a 2006 stroke, saw a return to solitary artistic concentration. His archive and artistic estate remain a wellspring for future scholarship.

What, then, endures from Mike Steiner’s work? Perhaps it is his fearless experimentation—his willingness to combine media, to stage the ephemeral, and to re-imagine what contemporary art can be. In a landscape where boundaries between genres increasingly blur, Steiner’s oeuvre offers both historical ground and fresh inspiration for new generations of artists and viewers.

For anyone interested in the living spirit of international contemporary arts, a deep dive into Mike Steiner’s art and projects is indispensable. His contributions are not only felt in performance, video, and abstract painting, but also in the evolving discourse about what art is and whom it serves. To explore more of his legacy—visual works, texts, and archives—visit the official artist page at Contemporary Art by Mike Steiner: Explore the official site for exhibitions, archives and insights – your essential portal to a richly innovative life in art.