Marykate O'Neil: BFF's Real and Imaginary

Marykate O’Neil, Pinkberry and Cigarretes, 2024

At Blue Mountain Gallery in Chelsea, Marykate O’Neil’s exhibition BFF’s Real and Imaginary brings together an unusual cast of friends: musicians, artists, people who have died, people whose lives have taken difficult turns, and even characters who exist primarily through the strange social universe of Instagram. 

At the center of the exhibition is Jill Sobule, O’Neil’s close friend and longtime musical collaborator, who died in 2025. Following her death, Marykate created a tribute exhibition devoted to her. In BFF’s Real and Imaginary, Sobule remains a central presence among a larger constellation of friends, memories, artists, cultural references and imaginary figures.

Marykate O'Neil, Don't Quit Smoking, 2025

The exhibition begins to unfold around a deceptively simple question: What is real?

O’Neil describes the paintings as both a tribute and an exploration of the uncertain boundaries between memory, presence and imagination. “I was thinking about how the pickle sisters are just as real as Jill,” she says. “Because Jill is gone. And actually, the friends I painted, they’re gone, too.”

The thought is strange, funny and deeply melancholic at once. It is also perfectly suited to Marykate’s painting language, which refuses to settle comfortably into one category. Her canvases are expressive and figurative, raw and humorous, personal and connected to popular culture. The gallery describes her work as simultaneously representational and expressionistic, with humor and playfulness woven into everyday imagery.

O’Neil's central concern is not simply whether an image represents reality. It is whether memory, imagination, digital life and artistic creation can become forms of reality themselves.

“These people live with me, but they’re gone,” O’Neil says. “And so it makes me think… were they ever here? Was it real? Are they real?”

From Music to Painting

For O’Neil, this question is inseparable from collaboration. She has spent decades moving between painting and music, and her friendships with musicians were not merely social relationships. They were creative relationships. With Sobule and other collaborators, she wrote songs, exchanged ideas, attended each other’s performances and shared the countless small observations that accumulate into an artistic life.

“When you collaborate with an artist in music, they become a part of you. They’re in your being,” Marykate says. “They are alive in my work. Because we collaborated together. I wrote music with them.”

The transition from music to painting therefore does not represent a break with her earlier creative life. It is another language for continuing it. “In a way, she’s not here, but she’s here,” O’Neil says of Sobule. “I’m still getting to write with her.”

That idea is especially significant in the paintings of Sobule. They are not conventional memorial portraits. O’Neil is not freezing her friend into a single image. Instead, she brings her back through the activities and rituals they shared: making music, going to museums, attending shows, exchanging photographs and jokes.

The people in these paintings are rarely shown simply posing for the viewer. They are caught doing things: smoking, drinking, talking, making music, going to museums, looking at art. Their social lives become the subject.

Marykate O'Neil, Slurpie and Cigarretes, 2024

“There’s something romantic about, like, a minor sin, being a rebel,” O'Neil says. The cigarette becomes less a symbol of addiction than of an attitude—a small act of rebellion belonging to a particular cultural memory. That spirit connects O’Neil’s friends to another recurring obsession: the Beat generation and counterculture.

“I’m always obsessed with beatniks and counterculture and artists,” she says. “And I just think so much about it.”

One painting depicts what O’Neil calls a “beatnik riot,” referring to a protest involving people who wanted to play folk music and were arrested. Another references a mugshot of a woman arrested for marijuana possession. The artist connects these images to the countercultural world she shared with Sobule, including the private jokes and references that accumulated throughout their friendship.

 

Marykate O'Neil, Bare Feet                    Coneheads (from Instagram series)

The exhibition also moves into the contemporary social world of Instagram. O’Neil transforms screenshots and online exchanges into paintings, giving physical form to images that would otherwise disappear into the endless stream of the feed.

Marykate O'Neil, The Family, 2025

“In this picture, my parents are dressed up like aliens,” she says. “Because we’re like aliens, artists are aliens.”

The image is a real Instagram post, complete with its original comments. In the gallery, however, it becomes something different. The fleeting post becomes a permanent object.

O’Neil’s relationship with Sobule also unfolded through digital exchange. “Jill and I would send things back and forth to each other, to make each other laugh all day.” Those photographs, jokes and absurd images became part of their friendship and, eventually, part of O’Neil’s paintings, transforming ephemeral digital moments into lasting images.

This transformation from pictures or screen to canvas is one of the most compelling aspects of the exhibition. The insignificant digital moment becomes a painting; a private joke becomes a public image; a photograph becomes memory; memory becomes another kind of presence.

One work, I Am Not a Robot, takes its title from the familiar online verification system in which users are asked to identify buses, traffic lights or other objects in photographs. O’Neil recalls never being able to get the images right. The painting also refers to a game she and Sobule played: sending each other photographs of the most boring things imaginable.

Marykate O'Neil, I'm Not a Robot, 2026

“What’s like the most boring thing you could find?”, they would ask each other. The joke is transformed into art. The ordinary is never entirely ordinary. Perhaps the most emotionally charged painting in the exhibition is Orion Keep Shining, which records a songwriting session involving Jill Sobule and Robin Eaton in North Carolina. O’Neil photographed the two musicians while they were writing together and later transformed the photographs into a layered painting.

“This was their last writing session before she died,” O’Neil says.

Marykate O'Neil, Orion Keep Shining, 2023

She worked on the piece for approximately a year. The title comes from the song they were writing, a reference to the stars. The painting therefore contains several temporal layers at once: the moment when the musicians were alive and working together, O’Neil’s later act of remembering that moment, and the completed painting that allows the scene to continue existing.

The work is also physically different from a conventional framed painting. O’Neil painted on canvas that had been attached to the side of a barn.

“I like it a little unfinished,” she says. “It feels more alive to me.”

That rawness seems important. The painting does not attempt to resolve grief. Its exposed edges resist the polished finality of a traditional memorial object.

Humor plays a similar role throughout the exhibition. Some paintings respond to contemporary political events, while others turn private jokes and absurd observations into images. Angry Tomato, for example, draws on a statement associated with evangelical preacher Pat Robertson concerning feminism and marriage. O’Neil transforms the reference into something comic and visually playful.

Marykate O'Neil, Angry Tomato

“Humor is how I deal with the world,” she says. “But that is how I deal with any pain. You just try to keep humor and power through.”

The laughter in these paintings therefore has an edge. It is a strategy for surviving the world as much as a form of entertainment.

The exhibition's title, BFF’s Real and Imaginary, ultimately describes more than a group of portraits: a personal universe populated by people, images, memories, cultural references and fictional figures. When asked how she decided to bring all these works together, O’Neil did not describe a strict narrative.

“I did want the show to just be, like, friends,” she says. “But by friends, I mean, like, the people or things that inhabit my life, in my head, all the time.”

This definition of friendship is what allows the exhibition to move so freely between the intimate and the imaginary. A dead friend, an Instagram personality, a musician, a family photograph and an invented character can occupy the same visual space because they occupy similar spaces in O’Neil’s consciousness.

The paintings of Jill Sobule make this especially clear. Sobule was not only a friend but a creative partner. “She was very important,” O’Neil says. “She’s my partner in crime because we were co-creators together. We created a lot together. Like fellow artists together.”

That word—co-creators—changes the way the paintings can be understood. O’Neil is not simply remembering Sobule; she is continuing an artistic dialogue that lasted for decades.

Marykate O'Neil, BFF's 4 EVA, 2026

Are They Real?

The exhibition's central question returns here with greater force. A photograph feels real because it records something that happened. An Instagram post feels real because someone made it. A painting feels real because it physically exists. A memory feels real because we continue to experience it.

But what happens when the person in the photograph dies? What happens when the photograph becomes a painting? What happens when an Instagram friend whom we have never met begins to occupy our imagination?

O’Neil does not answer these questions. Instead, she keeps painting them. The people in BFF’s Real and Imaginary may be dead, distant, ill, imagined or accessible only through a screen, but they continue to participate in O’Neil’s creative world.

That may be the underlying subject of BFF’s Real and Imaginary: continuation. O’Neil paints the people and images that continue to live inside her. She turns the social feed, the photograph, the private joke, the song, the cigarette, the museum visit and the memory into painted matter.

The result is an exhibition where the boundary between portrait and memory, reality and imagination, presence and absence stay deliberately unresolved. The friends may be gone, but they continue to inhabit the work—and O’Neil’s ongoing act of creation.

Susana Cabrera

The exhibition is on through October 3, 2026

Blue Mountain Gallery, 547 west 27th str, st. 200

New York, NY 10001