Two contrasting works boldly set the stage for the Middle East Institute Art Gallery’s “Maximal Miniatures,” a showcase of contemporary Iranian artists inspired by Persian miniature painting.
Amir H. Fallah, who left Iran with his family as a child in the 1980s, likewise responds to the war while recalling Persian mythology. His painting “For Those Who Fear Tomorrow” incorporates psychedelic hues and echoes of pop art in a composition that conjures terror and destruction: A death’s-skull hawk moth hovers before disoriented human figures whose heads and faces are covered, while a miniature-style warrior battles a dragon in the corner.
“Maximal Miniatures” not only shows the varied ways in which contemporary Iranian artists are inspired by and reinterpreting the tradition, it also highlights the miniature as a sort of visual mindset — as an art form that rewards multiple close inspections of its many details and multiple vantage points.
“Miniature gives us all of these tools to look,” Honarpisheh says. “If you can approach it the way that you might approach a poetic verse — you know, linger, meditate, return to it, try to see it from these different angles — then you can find, I think … all of these new perspectives.”
. 
