Michael Verhoef is a Brisbane-based emerging artist whose practice spans photography, papermaking and printmaking, with a focus on identity, ageing and queer experience. His work examines the lived realities of being an older gay man, using self-portraiture and anti-portraiture to question more mainstream representations of contemporary gay life and to foreground those aspects of the so-called “gay lifestyle” that are often overlooked or marginalised.

Born in the Netherlands and arriving in Brisbane in 1980, Verhoef’s practice is also shaped by the dislocation of migration and the enforced loss of language and culture. His hand-made papers, created from both Dutch and Australian books, fuse these materials as a way of addressing bi-cultural hybridity and a long-standing sense of being an outsider. The torn edges and visible imperfections in the paper become a direct metaphor for fracture, belonging and the “square peg in a round hole” narrative that has informed his life. Recent bodies of work, including a 2024 solo exhibition of fire-formed monotypes, extend these concerns to explore communication, desire and relational breakdown within queer lives.