Mike Steiner: Shaping Contemporary Art with Multimedia Vision and Avant-Garde Spirit

How does one redefine the boundaries between canvas and screen, between tableau and time? Mike Steiner, a pivotal figure of contemporary art, provided answers with works that expand both the format and spirit of art. Whether as a painter, video artist, curator, or networker, his multifaceted legacy continues to resonate—especially for those searching for new frontiers in creativity.

Discover contemporary artworks by Mike Steiner online – enter the artist's universe right here

Mike Steiner’s career began in the subcultures and experimental scenes of postwar Berlin. Early on, his abstract paintings drew deserved attention at the legendary Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung and in Berlin’s Kreuzberger Bohème. Marked by bold colour, gestural precision, and a tendency toward abstraction, these canvases already hinted at impatience with the limits of a single discipline.

But painting was only the beginning. Inspired by his experiences in New York during the mid-1960s, where he mingled with figures such as Allan Kaprow, Lil Picard, Al Hansen, and witnessed the rise of Pop Art and Fluxus, Mike Steiner started to question traditional forms. Like contemporaries Joseph Beuys or Nam June Paik, he realized that the real avant-garde breathes through experiment and risk. The result: a lifelong devotion to interdisciplinarity.

By the 1970s, Steiner had definitively crossed genre lines. In Berlin he established the now-legendary Hotel Steiner, quickly becoming a crossroads for international artists—akin to New York’s Chelsea Hotel or Paris’ Hôtel La Louisiane. Here, conversations overflowed into creative collaborations, and ideas fermented late into Berlin’s languid nights. Among frequent guests were Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovi?, and Valie Export—central names in contemporary arts Berlin who would also leave their mark in Steiner’s orbit.

Equally transformative was Steiner’s founding of his Studiogalerie in 1974, Berlin’s first independent forum dedicated to video art and performance. This space, inspired by his immersion in avant-garde studios such as Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, became both a laboratory and a stage. Steiner empowered artists of all nationalities by putting costly video equipment at their disposal—an unheard-of gesture in an era before democratized media. As the gallery’s program unfolded, Action Art, Fluxus, and performance found a tangible platform on Berlin’s cultural map.

What made his positions so unique? In a climate ripe with skepticism toward painting, Steiner embraced the moving image, sensing in video an opening into the yet-unwritten. His early collaborations with Fluxus legend Al Hansen or happenings with Allan Kaprow, his documentation of Marina Abramovi?’s iconoclastic body art, or unforgettable interventions like "Irritation – Da ist eine kriminelle Berührung in der Kunst" (1976) with Ulay: all these works demonstrate a masterful orchestration between artist, space, and medium.

Indeed, the 1976 performance in which Ulay removed a Spitzweg painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie—meticulously filmed by Steiner—stands as a key moment in German art history. Here, Steiner was both documentarian and accomplice, interpreting actions as filmic and conceptual statements. Much like Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman in the US, Steiner valued the ephemeral, the processual, and the subversive relationship between artist, art object, and audience.

From 1985, he expanded his reach with Die Videogalerie, a television format on cable TV that presented over 120 programs devoted to video art, interviews, and international reports. In evoking Jerry Schum's pioneering Fernsehgalerie, Steiner demonstrated not only artistic vision but also a pedagogical impulse, making the language of contemporary art accessible to the broader public—a rare synergy of curatorship and authorship.

Among his signature contributions stands the "Painted Tapes" series, a body of work intertwining video and painting into a single, almost synesthetic experience. These "paintings with electronic means" reference both the minimal abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly and the media experiments of Nam June Paik, yet remain utterly personal in their chromatic intensity and rhythmic structure.

Steiner’s archive and collection—now housed at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart—testify to his dual significance as both artist and chronicler of his age. The monumental solo exhibition "COLOR WORKS" (1999) at Hamburger Bahnhof marked the institutional recognition of his transmedial vision, showing abstract paintings that seem to shimmer with an inner pulse, as if pigment were moving, vibrating between two states of presence. Few artists have so consistently connected painting, video, sound, and performance.

Biographically, Mike Steiner’s journey mirrors postwar German art’s own search for identity and expression. Raised in West Berlin after being born in East Prussia, early drawn to both film and art, he straddled atmospheres of instability, migration, and reinvention. Encounters with significant figures—both locally and internationally—proved catalysts for his relentless pursuit of the “elsewhere” in art. Like a European echo of John Cage or Yoko Ono, Steiner’s greatest asset was his openness to risk, his refusal of artistic dogma.

In later years, Steiner gravitated again towards painting—aptly, to abstraction—while remaining an active chronicler and commentator on the vibrancy of contemporary arts Berlin. His late works, often executed in expansive fields of luminous color or in textile assemblages, proved that experiment and play were lifelong companions. Even following a stroke in 2006, he remained creatively engaged in his Berlin studio, a testament to unwavering passion.

His impact, tangible in institutions but also in the collective memory of artists, curators, and art historians, derives from a fundamental belief: that art is not confined to objects but blooms most potently in encounters, actions, and memories. Mike Steiner’s legacy is thus not simply a set of works or exhibitions, but a living impulse for future generations.

Why does his art matter now? Because, especially in a digitally saturated era, Steiner’s work reminds us that true innovation requires technical courage and conceptual daring. His life’s work blurs the lines between observer and participant, artwork and documentation, and asks each visitor to enter the dialogue. Discovering Mike Steiner—whether at the Hamburger Bahnhof or through online archives—means entering the laboratory of contemporary art in its most generous, unguarded form.

For those seeking deeper engagement, his official site offers insight, biographical detail, visual inspiration, and access to his enduring archive. Steiner’s world is not a closed chapter, but an ongoing experiment—an invitation.

Find more images, texts, and background on Mike Steiner’s art, archive, and exhibitions here

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