In the artist's words
He has spent his life collaborating with world-renowned artists such as Marina Abramović, Ulay, Jochen Gerz, VALIE EXPORT, Allan Kaprow, Ben Vautier, and many more. As a gallerist, producer, and constantly evolving artist, Steiner is not afraid of change—quite the opposite. Facing challenges head-on, he has always plunged headlong into new possibilities, styles, genres, and media of art. It is no coincidence that, as a critical visionary of his time, he became not only the founder and gallerist of the internationally legendary Berlin studio gallery and the producer of world-famous performance documentaries, but also a pioneer and promoter of German video art.
Steiner never wants to stagnate or become bored with his art. He constantly reinvents himself, employing a wide variety of styles, working methods, and artistic means of expression: alongside paintings of Informel, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, Steiner creates Minimal Art objects, video installations and sculptures, readymades, (de)collages, Mail Art, Copy Art, photographs, and, of course, video art.
Terms he coined, such as "Painted Tapes" and "Vilm," illustrate the fluid transition of his works into different genres and outline his unique, intermedial approach.
The "artist chameleon" Mike Steiner wants more—so he becomes the comprehensive artist whose multifaceted work we can now explore step by step.
More on this: Mike Steiner's oeuvre encompasses numerous genres, styles, and techniques—yet no single one exists in isolation within his work. His extensive body of work allows us to trace the most important art historical developments of the 1960s to 1980s. Steiner's pioneering work in video art plays by far the most significant role in his career.
From the 1980s onward, he created cross-media works from his perspective as a video artist, and with the turn of the millennium, he increasingly focused on abstract painting that emerged from his video aesthetic. In his Painted Tapes, Steiner propagated a new aesthetic of seeing, which he then translated into abstract painting in his final creative phase. Thus, with the turn of the century, a new form of abstract painting emerged – From Tape to Paint.
Klaus-Michel Steiner was born on July 8th in Allenstein, East Prussia (now Olsztyn, Poland), the second of three children of Klaus-Michel Steiner, a business graduate, and Gerda Steiner, née Schacht, a business teacher. He was baptized on July 17th in the chapel of St. Mary's Hospital there, with Adolf Schacht (Allenstein) and Margarete Steiner (Berlin) as his godparents.
Klaus-Michel Steiner was born on July 8th in Allenstein, East Prussia (now Olsztyn, Poland), the second of three children of Klaus-Michel Steiner, a graduate in business administration, and Gerda Steiner, née Schacht, a graduate in business education. He was baptized on July 17th in the chapel of St. Mary's Hospital, with Adolf Schacht (Allenstein) and Margarete Steiner (Berlin) as his godparents.
... He spent his childhood and youth in (West) Berlin.
Steiner's paternal grandfather was a ship's doctor and arrived in the Moroccan port city of Tangier in 1905. Steiner's father was born there the following year, after which the family remained in Tangier, only returning to Germany in 1920. The family settled in Berlin. There, Steiner's father met Gerda Schacht, who came from an old East Prussian noble family. Her family's stud farm near Allenstein served as a refuge for Steiner's family during the Second World War – Steiner's father was Jewish.
