Mike Steiner and Contemporary Art: From Fluxus to Media Pioneering at Hamburger Bahnhof

How does one define the boundaries between painting and video, between spontaneous action and meticulously planned composition? In the case of Mike Steiner, these boundaries not only blur—they spark. The contemporary art landscape in Berlin owes much to Steiner’s relentless curiosity, from abstract paintings pulsing with color to videos capturing performance as living memory. To encounter Steiner’s oeuvre is to step into a world in perpetual experimental flux, where the pulse of the city and the vision of an individual artist intermingle.

Discover Contemporary Artworks by Mike Steiner: Explore his legacy and groundbreaking videos online

Mike Steiner’s career charts a journey through many media, but it is united by an unmistakable energy and a belief in art’s transformative power. Even as a teenager, Steiner drew attention at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1959 with works like "Stillleben mit Krug", signaling the start of a restless artistic search. The early years saw him engaged with painting in the context of postwar abstraction, yet his vision soon expanded to embrace the languages of film, performance, and ultimately video. His artistic vocabulary reflected a rigorous training—studies at the Berlin University of the Arts under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn laid a technical foundation, while encounters in West Berlin’s vibrant bohemian circles and, crucially, in New York, propelled him towards radical experimentation.

What distinguished Steiner from many contemporaries was his openness to the crosscurrents of his age. Whereas figures like Joseph Beuys or Allan Kaprow left mark through singular artistic interventions, Steiner built platforms. The fabled Hotel Steiner near the Kurfürstendamm became in the early 1970s something akin to Berlin’s Chelsea Hotel—a magnet for international artists, performance experimenters, and the young Fluxus movement. Steiner’s space was not only a “home far from home”, as Lil Picard described, but also a wellspring for new forms: artists like Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, and Marina Abramovi?, key voices of contemporary performance, found in Steiner’s Studiogalerie not just walls, but an experimental stage and a video eye.

It was here in the Studiogalerie, founded in 1974, that Steiner embraced video as both a creative medium and a documentary tool, capturing ephemeral performance art and encouraging innovative cross-pollination. The gallery functioned in three ways: a video production site, a performance arena—crucially open to the feminist avant-garde—and as an independent exhibition venue. The legendary "Hotel Room Event" of 1979, a 36-hour performance organized with Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, stands as a milestone in the German performance scene. In these years, Berlin’s contemporary arts landscape, often overlooked compared to Cologne, found its own vital center.

Steiner’s signature works in video—often collaborations, as with Ulay’s infamous 1976 action "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst", or the documentation of Marina Abramovi?’s "Freeing the Body"—now form part of German and international art history. His role as both artist and producer bridges the improvisational spirit of Fluxus (think George Maciunas, Nam June Paik) and the intellectual rigor found in the work of American conceptualists like Allan Kaprow and Gary Hill. Projects such as the "Painted Tapes" series display his fascination with the fusion of painting and video: layers of analog tape transformed into painterly surfaces, multimedia abutting Minimal Art and Hard Edge, yet always underscored by a restless search for new form.

Not content with creation alone, Mike Steiner amassed a significant video art collection from 1974 onward, beginning with Reiner Ruthenbeck’s "Objekt zur teilweisen Verdeckung einer Videoszene." The collection—ultimately presented at Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart—became both archive and testament, offering works by Ulay, Bill Viola, Richard Serra and others, providing a living counterpoint to the more canonical museum displays. Steiner’s singular role is this: not only as creator and facilitator, but as one of the first committed collectors and curators in the still-embryonic field of video art in Germany.

The landmark solo exhibition "COLOR WORKS" at Hamburger Bahnhof in 1999 crystallized Steiner’s lasting influence. Here, his abstract paintings—begun in earnest in the 1990s—display a vibrant, almost musical color field sensibility, often evoking the emotional immediacy of his earlier performance works. They stand beside monumental canvases by contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz or Karl Horst Hödicke, yet are unmistakably the result of a mind at play with both pigment and pixel.

In the context of Contemporary Arts Berlin, Mike Steiner’s status as a catalyst cannot be overstated. His biography reads as a chronicle of postwar artistic energy: from his birth in Allenstein in 1941, formative years spent navigating West Berlin’s fractured spaces, first exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, and seminal contacts with international figures—be it through the Ford Foundation in America, or through performance networks in Germany and Italy. Close friendships and collaborations with Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Allan Kaprow testify to his position at the intersection of avant-garde painting, performance, and video.

Yet Steiner’s true innovation lay in dedication to process. His works, whether abstract paintings of his later years, interdisciplinary installations, or ephemeral happenings, manifest a voracious engagement with the possibilities of art: the dialogue between action and record, between color and image, between solitary creation and the collective experiment. The founding of the TV series "Videogalerie" (1985-1990) illustrates his desire to democratize video art, broadcasting over 120 episodes and giving voice to video practitioners across Germany and beyond—a visionary effort echoing Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, but distinct in scope and ambition.

Recent years saw Steiner return to painting with renewed abstraction, even as illness limited his public appearances. Here, too, the spirit of formal adventure endures, from vibrant color fields to delicately composed fabric works, always refusing to settle into a single method or medium. The 2011 exhibition "Live to Tape" at Hamburger Bahnhof presented this arc in full: process, performance, and painting as continuous, interwoven exploration.

Fascinatingly, Steiner’s legacy as an artist is inextricable from his work as a networker, supporter, and documentarian. Within the context of contemporary art’s evolution, his position is akin to that of Nam June Paik—an instigator of the new, simultaneously shaping and reflecting the creative tendencies of his time. For art historians and enthusiasts alike, an exploration of the official site Mike Steiner is highly recommended for insight, deep archival materials, and the visual force of his manifold career.

Mike Steiner, in sum, remains a pillar of contemporary art. His search for expressive form—across painting, video, performance, and installation—and his commitment to nurturing others’ talents, make him essential viewing for anyone drawn to the pulse of avant-garde and Contemporary Arts Berlin. Whether experienced through a canvas or a flickering screen, his works vibrate with the energy of innovation and a well-lived artistic life.