The Missing Link

If “celebrity photographer shoots monkeys” sounds a little high-concept even for Hollywood, all we can say is, the apes look just fabulous. In her stylized images of the famous and the entertaining, artist Jill Greenberg, whose website is titled www.manipulator.com, often employs digital enhancements that blur the line between photorealist painting and staged photo fantasias of the Annie Leibovitz school. In this portrait series now at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Greenberg applies ravishing digital color work and a canny sense of character to several monkey species, with unsettling results. Not to encourage the analogy, but there’s some good acting on view here. Who knows, maybe we could put the monkeys on the red carpet and ship the celebs off to the product testing labs.

“Monkey Portraits,” Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; (323) 937-0765, through Dec. 11.