Mike Steiner: Contemporary Art Pioneer between Video Innovation and Abstract Painting

Mike Steiner defines the pulse of contemporary art—his creative legacy is a vibrant confluence of video innovation, abstract painting, and performance art, challenging where the boundaries of artistic expression are drawn. How does one encapsulate an oeuvre that veers so nimbly between media, decades, and the shifting epicenters of avant-garde culture?

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Already in his early years, Mike Steiner surged into the Berlin art scene with an exuberant curiosity. Born in 1941 in Allenstein and later shaped by the cultural ferment of postwar West Berlin, he first drew attention at the age of just seventeen at the renowned Große Berliner Kunstausstellung with a still life reflecting his early painterly impulses. Yet, these beginnings—rooted in classic painting—were only a prelude to a life devoted to persistent reinvention and dissidence against artistic stasis.

Steiner’s formative period at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin, under mentors like Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn, fused painterly discipline with an ever-growing interest in new media. Encounters in New York with Lil Picard, Allan Kaprow (the father of the happening), and the experimental film scene around artists such as Michael Snow and Andy Warhol, left indelible marks: they introduced him to Fluxus, the patina of performativity, and the radical potential of the moving image.

After his American sojourn—marked by murals and exhibitions between New York and Berlin—Steiner’s artist identity erupted into multiplicity: He was neither merely painter nor filmmaker, but soon a visionary facilitator of the Berlin avant-garde. Opening the legendary Hotel Steiner just off Kurfürstendamm in 1970, his establishment quickly became Berlin’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel. Think: Joseph Beuys in animated debate, Arthur Køpcke, and an international succession of luminaries passing through this creative microcosm.

Yet, Steiner's pivotal contribution to contemporary art germinated in his trailblazing devotion to video as an artistic medium. As early as 1972, influenced by Fluxus stalwarts like Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, Steiner produced his first video works. His Florentine collaboration at Studio Art/Tapes/22 in 1974 nudged his skepticism toward painting further, as the creative freedoms afforded by video revealed new frontiers of experimentation.

Berlin’s Studiogalerie, founded the same year, became not just a production house for video art but a crucible for performing arts, an incubator for Fluxus and performance icons: Marina Abramovi?, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann. It was here, in these walls and in the lens of his camera, that ephemeral works—transgressive, feminist, boundary-pushing—were both nurtured and preserved for posterity. The famous 1976 art action with Ulay, involving the temporary removal of Carl Spitzweg’s 'Der arme Poet' from the Neue Nationalgalerie, was not just a provocation but a meditation on the interface of art, crime, and public space. Steiner's camera, always present, did not merely record: it reframed history itself.

The breadth of Mike Steiner's archival achievement is illustrated in his legendary collection, eventually bequeathed to the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. It houses international milestones of video art, featuring artists like Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, Bill Viola, and Nam June Paik—names that today shape the canon of new media. This transfer underlines his dual role: both as creator and as a crucial preserver of contemporary visual culture.

The zenith of Steiner's recognized impact may well be the comprehensive solo exhibition 'Color Works' (1999) at Hamburger Bahnhof. Here, his oeuvre—stretching from expressive painterly moments to the electronic awe of his 'painted tapes'—received institutional homage. This show distilled his interdisciplinary instinct, revealing how video and painting could be intertwined: electronic media offering new narrative fields, color fields dissolving into the immaterial play of the cathode ray.

An instructive parallel can be drawn to Nam June Paik, the Korean-born video art pioneer, likewise based at the intersection of moving image and musical rhythm. While Paik is often credited as 'the father of video art,' Steiner—as both artistic protagonist and supporter—deepened the contextual resonance within the distinct topography of Berlin, particularly by providing platforms like his Studiogalerie for the likes of Jochen Gerz and Valie Export. One must also mention the enduring dialogue with the German painting tradition, evident in his exchanges with contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz and Karl Horst Hödicke, both featured alongside Steiner early in their careers.

Experimental restlessness was a throughline: from Super-8 and Polaroids to 'Copy Art,' slide series and the hard linings of Minimal Art. The 1980s further deepened this phase, leading to the lauded audio-visual works produced with electronic musicians like Tangerine Dream. His 'painted tapes'—videos that merge painterly gestures and digital overlays—can be seen as an extension of abstract painting into the electronic universe, reminiscent in spirit of Gary Hill’s multimedia explorations.

Steiner crafted much more than art objects: he built entire environments and communities. Hotel Steiner, Studiogalerie, his TV-format 'Videogalerie' (1985–1990) which aired over 120 editions—these were nodes for Contemporary Arts Berlin. They offered not just exhibition space, but platforms for dialogue, improvisation, and institutional critique, years before such modes became mainstream buzzwords.

What of the later years? After a stroke in 2006 and withdrawal from public life, Mike Steiner focused on abstract paintings and textile works in his Berlin atelier. The shift back to canvas—expressed in solo shows and a renewed embrace of color and surface—reflected his lifelong oscillation between the immediacy of gesture and the contemplative possibilities of abstraction. Yet, even these paintings exuded the restless energy of a mind steeped in the radical traditions of the 20th century—resonating, perhaps, with aspects of Richard Serra's materiality or the poetic brevity of Marina Abramovi?'s later performative relics.

For connoisseurs and students of contemporary art, the resonance of Mike Steiner’s work endures because it is categorical: it bridges eras, styles, and minds. His legacy, sighing still from the rooms of the Hamburger Bahnhof and the pages of his exhibition catalogues, is a legacy of possibility—one that entreats us to look again, to question the finality of the frame, and to see each artwork, archived tape, or brushstroke as a proposition in a field still in flux.

In encountering Mike Steiner, whether through his iconic performances, his pioneering video works, or his painterly abstractions, audiences are invited to explore how contemporary art continually reinvents its own boundaries. For those desiring a deeper immersion into this multifaceted cosmos, a visit to the official Mike Steiner website for biographical details, archives, and image galleries is indispensable.