Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Beyond Boundaries – Pioneer of Berlin’s Avant-garde

How do you chart a lifework that blurred the boundaries between painting, video, and performance art? Mike Steiner, a name synonymous with contemporary art in Berlin, provides a resounding answer. From his early forays into painting to groundbreaking experiments in video and action arts, Steiner’s oeuvre stands like a vibrant crossroads of genres, ideas, and historical currents—shaped by restless curiosity and uncanny innovation. His vision, marked by radical openness and dedication to the new, permeates the history of Contemporary Arts Berlin like few others.

Discover contemporary art by Mike Steiner – explore selected works and media here

Mike Steiner’s legacy unfolds in distinct chapters that together form a narrative of German post-war art’s most significant transformations. Early on, Steiner’s work reflected the pulse of abstract painting—he first attracted public attention in 1959 at Berlin’s Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. His large canvases and graphic works, which gained him a place among peers like Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, were expressive, imbued with dynamic forms and a color palette both poetic and bold. Even in these beginnings, one senses a yearning to expand beyond the static, a curiosity that would soon lead him to New York’s explosively creative scene. There, amidst the likes of Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and the circles of Fluxus and Happenings, Steiner soaked up radical new approaches, from Pop Art interjections to the frontal assault of multimedia experience. Steiner’s sojourn to America—his encounters with Kaprow and frequenting Robert Motherwell’s studio—brought him face-to-face with artists such as Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, and Carolee Schneemann, who were themselves reshaping the international avant-garde. These influences seeped into Steiner’s German work: by the early 1970s, doubt in painting as a sole means of artistic expression drove him towards moving images. The result was a pioneering engagement with early video art.

Steiner’s Berlin became a laboratory for art without borders. In 1970, he established the legendary Hotel Steiner near Kurfürstendamm—a gathering spot reminiscent of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where German and American artists mingled. Sculpture, action, and installation fused here, marking a moment when Contemporary Arts Berlin irrevocably opened to global currents. This spirit continued with the Studiogalerie in 1974. Modeled after Florence’s Art/Tapes/22 and focused on video as both an independent artform and tool for documenting ephemeral performances, the Studiogalerie supplied artists—including Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Marina Abramovi?, Ben Vautier, and Carolee Schneemann—with resources to produce, present, and archive their experimental works. The venue became synonymous with a newly forming Berlin avant-garde—akin to Joseph Beuys’ Free University or Allan Kaprow’s “Environments”—and helped establish video as a legitimate medium in the German and European art discourse.

Perhaps most emblematic of this restless experimentation is Steiner’s Painted Tapes, a multimedia synthesis that conjoins painted surface and video movement. These works, such as the highly lauded "Mojave Plan" and "Penumbras 3," break with linear narratives—images bleed, colors stutter and dissolve, frames merge into an orchestration of abstraction and technological play. In these pieces, Steiner is not only documentarian but also composer, allowing viewers a synesthetic experience that bridges the traditions of abstract painting and electronic media. Here, his influence is echoed in the likes of Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, fellow pioneers who, like Steiner, saw the potential for video to transform perception and presence.

Yet for all his technical innovation, Steiner’s art remains rooted in a fascination with the ephemeral—be it the fleeting nature of performance, the evanescence of light, or the impermanence of social encounters in the urban fabric. His legendary 1976 collaboration with Ulay—“Irritation: Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst”—not only redefined artistic intervention but also highlighted art’s social context and its power to provoke public discourse. The act, in which Ulay removed Carl Spitzweg’s “Der arme Poet” from the Neue Nationalgalerie and relocated it to a Kreuzberg living room, became a sensation and symbol for artistic freedom, tragically presaging later debates surrounding the boundaries and responsibilities of art.

By the mid-1980s, Steiner had expanded his role to television with "Die Videogalerie," producing and moderating over 120 broadcasts focused on video art for the Berlin Kabel-Pilot-Projekt. This ambitious endeavor, inspired by Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, offered a platform for emerging and established artists alike—making works by luminaries such as Marina Abramovi?, Richard Serra, and Gary Hill accessible to a broad public. Steiner’s work as curator, moderator, and educator in this context was crucial for the recognition of new media within the canon of contemporary art.

In the arc of his career, Steiner always sought to connect—art forms, artists, and audiences. As a collector and creator, his accumulated video archive became one of the most significant private collections of its kind. When he entrusted it to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in 1999, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart received an invaluable trove of early video art, including works by Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, and Nam June Paik. Major exhibitions, most notably “COLOR WORKS” (1999) at Hamburger Bahnhof, solidified his role as artist and catalyst. In these rooms, his abstract canvases and electronic compositions converse seamlessly, each informing the other.

Steiner’s journey was also shaped by resistance and self-reflection: his growing doubts in the autonomy of painting pushed him toward hybrid forms; his persistent experimentation with Super 8, photography, Copy Art, slide series, and installations charted a unique path alongside, but never within, mainstream currents. Drawing compositional comparisons with artists like Marina Abramovi? in performance or the fearless interventions of Joseph Beuys, Mike Steiner stands as a bridge figure—avant-garde in method, generous in spirit.

His later years were marked by a return to abstraction—large, luminous canvases and textile works that synthesize decades of formal inquiry. Even after his serious stroke in 2006, he continued, quietly, in his studio, committed to the evolution of a language that could encompass both the tactile world and the immaterial. Until his passing in 2012, Mike Steiner remained an essential interlocutor for Berlin’s art scene.

What keeps the work of Mike Steiner not only alive but vital? Perhaps it is his unwavering belief in dialogue—between genres, between artists, between the artwork and society. His ability to pivot, adapt, and transform while always situating art as a public, social experiment cements his status in the canon of contemporary art. Influenced by, and ultimately contributing to, the legacies of Fluxus, Minimalism, and multimedia, Steiner’s archive, installations, and paintings invite renewed discovery by every generation.

For those eager to trace the many threads of contemporary art, the official Mike Steiner website offers in-depth resources, current research, and a window onto a groundbreaking legacy. ????