Mike Steiner: Defining Contemporary Art through Visionary Experimentation and Videotape

The contemporary art scene in Berlin would be unimaginable without the radical energy and cross-media innovation of Mike Steiner. Even decades after his most influential interventions, Steiner’s legacy pulses through the corridors of Hamburger Bahnhof and resonates with a new generation of artists. What makes Mike Steiner’s art so enduring? Is it the fearless blend of painting and performance, or is it his restless curiosity that continually redrew the map of artistic possibility in postwar Germany?

Discover contemporary artworks by Mike Steiner – explore highlights of the Berlin avant-garde here

Steiner’s art defies easy categorization. His paintings—often shifting into pure abstraction in later years—convey a vibrant immediacy, while his pioneering video works distill the essence of temporal and performative arts. There is a kinetic quality, a sense that every canvas or videotape is part of a larger, feverish experiment in form and meaning. Berlin, a city long haunted by the aftershocks of modernism, found in Mike Steiner a restless creative whose work both reflected and shaped the new currents of contemporary arts Berlin.

Emerging as a child of East Prussia before coming of age in West Berlin, Mike Steiner’s journey mirrors the turbulence and regeneration of postwar Europe. His first public appearance, at just 17, at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, already hinted at a penchant for renewal. Early works, like the 1958 painting "Stillleben mit Krug," leaned toward gestural abstraction—yet soon, the echoes of Art Informel, Pop Art, and the undercurrents of Fluxus would course through his practice. Steiner’s time in New York, as a guest in the circle of Lil Picard, opened doors to figures such as Robert Motherwell, Allan Kaprow, and Al Hansen, with encounters that would stoke his appetite for cross-media creation and the performative edge of the avant-garde.

From the landmark Hotel Steiner, a nexus for international creators compared to the legendary Chelsea Hotel, to his radical Studiogalerie that redefined Berlin’s artistic topography in the 1970s, Steiner forged spaces where performance, new media, and artistic dialogue could flourish. At the forefront was his passionate embrace of video: witnessing the rise of experimental film in New York, he recognized in magnetic tape the ideal medium for the ever-evolving energies of contemporary art. Collaborations with stalwarts like Ulay, Marina Abramovi?, and Valie Export, as documented in his archive, became milestones—none more notorious than the 1976 "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst," a staged art heist that challenged the very sanctity of institutional space. This action, among others, remains etched in Berlin’s performance art history, a testament to Steiner’s unique blend of humor, provocation and conceptual rigour.

His greatest solo exhibition, 1999’s "COLOR WORKS" at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, was an unequivocal salute to Steiner’s transgressive energy and his role as a mediator between painting and video. The show captured the essential tension in his work—between surface and time, gesture and record, medium and message. There, alongside his luminous abstract paintings, Steiner displayed video projects that articulated the fleeting beauty of action: moments of release, repetition, and subtle subversion. These "Painted Tapes," the synthesis of videotaped movement and painted gesture, dissolve boundaries between static and dynamic visuality, anticipating dialogues later picked up by artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Gary Hill, all of whom also feature in Steiner’s comprehensive video collection.

Yet, what set Mike Steiner apart from many of his contemporaries—such as Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, or Bill Viola—was not the adoption of new techniques for their own sake, but rather the persistent interrogation of what it meant to produce, circulate, and remember art in an age of technological acceleration. Steiner was as much collector and connector as creator: his Berlin Video archive, now held by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and at Hamburger Bahnhof, preserves seminal works from Abramovi?, Ulay, Richard Serra, and more, bearing witness to Berlin’s transformation from provincial outpost to global contemporary arts capital.

Steiner’s biography reads as a chronicle of artistic hunger and intellectual adventure. After initial studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin (mentored by Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn), and a Ford Foundation scholarship in the US, Steiner’s artistic territory expanded by leaps and bounds. Encounters in New York with figures at the heart of Fluxus and early performance—Kaprow, Hansen—helped propel him further into the experimental ferment that informed every subsequent stage of his practice. His commitment to the international avant-garde was evident not just in his work, but in his mentorship and curatorial projects, through which he championed emerging forms and artists who might otherwise have foundered on the margins of the official art world.

The Studiogalerie, which Steiner established in 1974, functioned as a production hub, exhibition site, and performance laboratory. Here, he supplied video equipment to artists, fostering a community akin to the Florentine Art/Tapes/22 and the Cologne media scenes around Wulf Herzogenrath. Within its white walls, legendary actions by artists like Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, and Ben Vautier unfolded—events simultaneously ephemeral and, thanks to Steiner’s lens, indelibly preserved. His dual role as both documentarian and participant blurred the lines between witness and author, a stance reflective of his belief that contemporary art must constantly question its own structures of creation and remembrance.

Through the 1980s, Mike Steiner multiplied his forms of inquiry: working with Super-8, photography, copy art and even large-scale installations. The so-called "Painted Tapes" epitomized this restless search for hybrid forms, integrating the sensual immediacy of painted marks with the evanescence of video. His later return to abstract painting, post-2000, was itself a kind of philosophical closure—an homage to color, plane, and the joy of pure visual experience. Critics have drawn parallels between these works and those of abstract contemporaries like Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully, yet Steiner’s painting always bore the stamp of his video sensibility: flickering edges, overlapping registers, the suspension between flux and fixity.

Throughout, Steiner's philosophy championed the experimental, the open-ended, the interdisciplinary. He remained, until his death in 2012, a restless presence—collaborating, collecting, and questioning. His "Videogalerie" television project (1985–1990) anticipated the logic of art streaming, democratizing access and creating a living archive for contemporary arts Berlin and beyond. As a teacher, organizer, and collector, Steiner left a blueprint for what an engaged artistic life could mean: curiosity without boundary, creation as a form of transmission, and radical hospitality towards unruly forms of expression.

From the tumult of his early years to the quiet innovations of his last, Mike Steiner’s legacy remains vital, a touchstone for those who would rethink the possibilities of contemporary art. His commitment to the new—embodied equally in his collaborations and his own works—ensures his resonance in every conversation about the moving image, performance, and abstract painting today. A visit to Mike Steiner's official website – explore his biography, works, and exhibitions here invites a deeper encounter with an artist who understood better than most: art lives by crossing its own borders.