Mike Steiner: Rediscovering a Visionary of Contemporary Art and Video Avant-garde

Mike Steiner shaped contemporary art through a pioneering blend of painting, video, and performance. His work stands at the intersection of innovation and tradition, making him a pivotal artist for our times.

Few figures in German contemporary art embody the restless spirit of innovation like Mike Steiner. From his earliest forays into painting to his legacy as a pioneer of video art, Steiner’s practice bridges media, continents, and generations, always in pursuit of the new. But what does it mean to rewrite the rules of artistic expression in a city like Berlin, where history and experiment so uneasily coexist?

Anyone encountering Mike Steiner's oeuvre is instantly struck by its multidimensionality—a restless oscillation between painting, video, and the language of performance. Steiner’s embrace of the new was not superficial; his work is defined by a tireless experimental drive, evident from his early days as a teenage painter in postwar Berlin, through his close ties to international avant-gardes, to his later embrace of abstraction and digital methods.

Early on, Mike Steiner distinguished himself within the thriving postwar German art world. Entering the vibrant Kreuzberg art scene, he was already experimenting with painting at seventeen, exhibiting at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. Influenced by both local artists and the international pulse of Berlin, Steiner’s paintings soon caught attention in both Germany and abroad. Young contemporaries like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, themselves forging new ground in the visual arts, were among those with whom Steiner's work was exhibited in Paris, Milan, and Geneva.

Yet it is perhaps his restless mediation between genres that set Mike Steiner apart within the contemporary arts Berlin scene. Moving to New York in the mid-1960s, Steiner found himself absorbed into the gravitational pull of Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art. Introduced by the legendary Lil Picard, he befriended Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen while visiting the studio of Robert Motherwell. The artistic ferment of the city—echoing the radicalism of figures like Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Marina Abramovi?—would shape Steiner’s future definitively.

On returning to Berlin, his sense of art’s boundaries was forever altered. The foundation of the Hotel Steiner in 1970 provided a bustling center for the international avant-garde—often compared to New York’s Chelsea Hotel—welcoming luminaries such as Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and later, pioneers of video and performance.

It is in the evolution toward video art that Steiner’s true innovation revealed itself. By the early 1970s, chafing at the limits of painting amid a “legitimation crisis,” Steiner was drawn toward video, seeing it as a means to synthesize time, space, and event in ways traditional media could not. Inspired by his experiences in Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 and collaborations with Al Hansen and others, Steiner established the Studiogalerie in Berlin in 1974—a unique hub for video production, installation, and performance art.

Few locations so vividly embodied the pulse of contemporary art and its global networks. The Studiogalerie equipped young creators—including feminist and avant-garde icons like VALIE EXPORT, Marina Abramovi?, Carolee Schneemann, and Jochen Gerz—with the tools and freedom to experiment, document, and ultimately expand the possibilities of artistic presentation. Steiner’s role, both as organizer and artist, was pivotal. He produced, filmed, and often participated in seminal works—most famously, the 1976 action with Ulay, in which the iconic painting "Der arme Poet" was spirited from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, forging connections to the radical performance traditions embodied by Allan Kaprow and Ben Vautier.

This period also positioned Mike Steiner alongside other major contemporaries. In his fearless medial crossings, he resonates with international figures such as Bill Viola, Richard Serra, and George Maciunas, all of whom are represented in his legendary video collection. Yet Steiner’s vision remained uniquely focused on forging a link between Berlin and the world—between painting and moving image, between the history of art and its electronic futures.

The legacy of the 1980s was defined by a new embrace of hybrid forms: Super-8 film, Copy Art, photography, and multimedia installation. His "Painted Tapes" stand as perhaps the clearest articulation of his idea: paintings that extend into the electronic, where brushstroke meets pixels, and the boundary between visual traditions and digital futures dissolves. These pioneering art installations and abstract paintings tie closely to the technological spirit of the era, echoing contemporaries like Bruce Nauman and Allan Kaprow, while carving out a distinctly Berlin identity. Tangerine Dream’s international tour, captured by Steiner’s camera, further illustrates this phase—melding music, performance, and image into a singular artistic event.

Throughout, Mike Steiner’s work reflects a deep commitment to archiving, mediating, and educating as much as creating. His acclaimed Videogalerie television series of the late 1980s and early 1990s—at once a showcase, a classroom, and an archive—brought international contemporary arts to German living rooms, anticipating by decades the kind of video dissemination now ubiquitous in the digital age.

The significance of Steiner’s archive cannot be overstated. Donated to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in 1999 and housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, it stands alongside those of the world’s major museums. Here, early recordings from Ulay, Gary Hill, and Nam June Paik, as well as documentation of the Berlin Fluxus scene, continue to illuminate paths taken—and untaken—by contemporary artists worldwide.

Yet the late work of Mike Steiner is no less essential. From the 2000s onward, a return to abstract painting signaled not a retreat but an integration of decades of experimentation: the materiality of brush and canvas channeling the lessons of electronic media. His final years, marked by works on fabric and painting, showcase a reflective, yet undiminished, creative spirit.

The critical highlight of Steiner’s career—his monumental solo exhibition “COLOR WORKS 1995–98” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999—affirmed his enduring influence. Today, his contribution to contemporary art is felt not only within Berlin but wherever artists cross and recross the boundaries of image, event, and archive.

So why, even now, does the work of Mike Steiner invite our attention? Those fascinated by art’s ceaseless reinvention—by the meeting of tradition and the untamed—find in Steiner a touchstone. His archive and artworks offer a living blueprint for how to think, feel, and create in the twenty-first century. A closer look—both at collections and at his website—rewards the art lover with discoveries that are at once historic and bracingly fresh.

For deeper explorations, images, and exhibition details, the official website offers an indispensable portal through Steiner’s extraordinary artistic universe.

Find more on Mike Steiner’s artistic legacy, exhibitions, and the complete archive here

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