Mike Steiner: Visionary of Contemporary Art and Pioneer of Video Innovation

What if the boundaries between painting and moving image are not limits, but new beginnings? The art of Mike Steiner, steeped in Berlin's radical scene, challenges conventions, forging connections where others see walls. With contemporary art as both his aim and battlefield, Steiner’s oeuvre resonates well beyond the studio walls – rippling through time, media and art history itself.

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Atmospheric and restless, Steiner’s art is impossible to pin down. His abstract paintings from later years shimmer with chromatic interplay and meditative gesture, while his pioneering video installations – born of the experimental crucible that was Berlin in the 1970s – catch ephemeral energies with almost documentary clarity. Each work exudes a profound openness to the unexpected, the unresolved, the truly contemporary.

Mike Steiner’s career began with paintbrush in hand, blossoming in the charged air of post-war Berlin. By 1959, still in his teens, his canvases graced the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. His studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste under Hans Jaenisch and Hans Kuhn grounded him in painterly tradition, yet even early on, his interests sprawled toward the new and unorthodox. A Ford Foundation scholarship took him to the US in the mid-1960s, where through Lil Picard he entered the ferment of New York’s Fluxus and Pop Art – encountering artists like Allan Kaprow and Robert Motherwell, absorbing performance, happening and conceptual rigor. These influences germinated into a lifetime of artistic exploration straddling continents, genres and communities.

In 1970, Steiner opened the legendary Hotel Steiner near Kurfürstendamm. Like Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, it became a crossroads for international artists — Joseph Beuys, Arthur Køpcke, and visitors from New York’s scene, each finding both shelter and inspiration. These encounters and conversations – often nocturnal, always animated – seeded ideas that would soon move beyond the canvases. In dialogue with contemporaries, Steiner saw the necessity to push beyond static art objects toward interaction, process, even provocation.

The transition to video art crystallized in the early 1970s, inspired by journeys to Florence’s experimental studio Art/Tapes/22 and collaborations with key Fluxus figures like Al Hansen. Facing what he described as a “crisis of legitimation for painting,” Steiner found in video a way to connect the immediacy of performance with the preserving eye of the camera. His own Studiogalerie, founded in Berlin’s Ludwigkirchstraße in 1974, quickly became an epicenter for avant-garde experiments in Contemporary Arts Berlin. Here, he both created and enabled art: offering tools, space, and encouragement for multimedia experimentation. Performances by Valie Export, Marina Abramovi?, Ulay – icons in their own right – were documented and often realized thanks to Steiner’s vision and resourcefulness.

Of all his contributions, Steiner’s role as connector stands out. Like Nam June Paik, Gary Hill or Bill Viola, he did not simply make video art – he forged an ecosystem around it. His growing archive of tapes, begun with an acquisition from Reiner Ruthenbeck in 1974, swelled to become one of the foremost video collections in Germany. The 1976 documentation of Ulay’s art-action “Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst,” where a Spitzweg painting was symbolically ‘removed’ from the Nationalgalerie, underscored the performative, ephemeral, and political edge of his practice.

The international resonance of Steiner’s work is manifest in his curatorial projects: organizing the pioneering video program for ART Basel, assembling a robust selection for the Venice Biennale’s historical archives, and conceiving broadcasts like Die Videogalerie on Berlin cable television. From the mid-1980s, his television productions introduced the broad public to contemporary video art in an accessible, even playful, format. Here, in over 120 episodes, Mike Steiner blurred the boundaries between installation and broadcast, turning the living room into a Kunsthalle, and the television itself into an art installation.

Yet his engagement with painting never vanished. Particularly in later decades, after a stroke in 2006, Steiner returned with renewed focus to abstract compositions, producing luminous works that draw on the visual grammars of Hard Edge, Color Field, and Minimal Art. These late canvases suggest kinship with peers such as Georg Baselitz or Karl Horst Hödicke, yet always retain a flickering edge of experimentation unique to Steiner. His “Painted Tapes” – hybrid works fusing video stills and painterly intervention – evidence his lifelong resolve to question, blur, and expand the grammar of his media.

Recognition for Mike Steiner’s role in contemporary art has only grown with time. His largest solo show, "COLOR WORKS" at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (1999), positioned his practice both in dialogue with international movements and as a singular force in postwar German art. Art historians now see Steiner as a key bridge between the gestural energy of postwar painting and the technological upheavals of video, digital art, and performance. Compared to the likes of Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovi?, and Joseph Beuys, Steiner’s restlessness and curiosity shine – always searching for new forms to frame reality, always opening doors for fellow artists.

His influence persists well beyond his passing in 2012. The Hamburger Bahnhof now houses much of Steiner’s legendary video collection, a trove of ephemeral yet vital artistic memory. Retrospectives, from the "Live to Tape" show (2011/12) to recent exhibitions in DNA Galerie Berlin and beyond, reaffirm his place among artists who have both made and remade the field of contemporary art. Today, art connoisseurs cite his legacy in performance, moving-image, and abstract painting; educators and curators consult his archive for both research and inspiration.

What remains most arresting is the sensibility running through all of Mike Steiner’s works: a willingness to risk, to collaborate, and to see the act of creation itself as endlessly unfinished. To immerse oneself in Steiner’s world is to witness the expansion of art’s possibilities – from the hotel room-turned-atelier to the gallery and into the realm of public broadcast and installation. He stands as a radical facilitator, an artist for whom contemporary art meant freedom, inclusion, and perpetual experimentation. For anyone drawn to the living pulse of art today, Mike Steiner’s journey invites deeper exploration and recognition.

Fascinated? For extensive insights, works, and a unique view into Mike Steiner’s oeuvre, visit the artist’s official website – your gateway to Berlin’s legacy of contemporary art.