WASHINGTON (WP) -- 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.
Elham Pourkhani’s “Zahhak’s Castle Is Calm” exemplifies many characteristics of the centuries-old artistic tradition. At just about 23 by 27 inches, the intimate piece is striking in its brilliant colors and rich ornamental detail. Its subject is Zahhak, a mythical ruler in the Persian national epic — the Shahnameh, or “Book of Kings” — whose evil, bloodthirsty reign lasted 1,000 years.
Like many miniatures, Pourkhani’s piece depicts several interconnected rooms and scenes, both interior and exterior; there is no single focal point. Trees in an array of bright greens are layered throughout, both overlapping the castle and spilling outside the painting’s formal edged borders. The artist adds a disturbing angle to Zahhak’s sinisterness: Most of the tiny human figures have skulls for heads, and there are faint outlines of piles of more skulls and of bodies hanging from trees.
Just across from it, Mahsa Tehrani’s stunning “A Land of Magnets and Miracles” offers a more monumental approach. Her triptych oil painting — the largest work in the show at 9½ feet long by more than 4½ feet high — portrays a landscape of people, animals and plants on a grassy expanse, with mountains beyond. As in Pourkhani’s tableau, there is no one spot to focus the eye, which is drawn to the disproportionately sized figures and objects scattered, dreamlike, across the leprechaun-green color field in a way reminiscent of Brooklyn illustrator Dan Funderburgh’s tongue-in-cheek wallpaper designs.
Part of Tehrani’s “The Hunting Ground” series, the painting is — like Pourkhani’s — more foreboding than it might first appear: Dead birds lie on the ground; a Chinese vase is in shards; a man aims a rifle at a stag. On closer inspection, the seemingly pastoral scene of people coexisting with nature reveals the destruction wrought by humans on the world around them.
The show includes 21 works by 13 artists of Iranian heritage — several based in Iran, the rest in the diaspora — with most dating to the past decade. Classical miniatures were generally made with watercolor and ink on paper, but the works here also include oil or acrylic on canvas or other materials, mixed-media collage, and reverse glass painting.
While some artists reinterpret the miniature in style or format, others nod to it through their themes and subjects, including references to the Shahnameh, which remains a touchstone in Iranian culture more than 1,000 years after it was written. Indeed, miniatures often illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnameh (as showcased in a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Asian Art).
“I think it would be impossible to talk about the miniature without talking about the Shahnameh and the way this epic narrative was so significant to creating a sense of Iranian national consciousness,” curator Donna Honarpisheh said at an opening-night panel. Artists working today “have always returned to these stories … and how they can tell us something about the present.”
A rather abstract and expressionistic untitled 1989 diptych by the late Farideh Lashai (the only nonliving artist in the show), for example, has little stylistic connection to the miniature. But Honarpisheh, an associate curator of art and research at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, noted that the woman’s face in the center represents Rudabeh, the mother of Rostam, one of the central heroes of the Shahnameh. Lashai invoked Rudabeh as a witness to past conflicts, while herself grappling with the Iran-Iraq war.
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.
Although gender isn’t an overt theme, more than half the artists are women, and they offer some of the strongest work in the show.
“Party,” a diptych of self-portraits by Bahar Sabzevari that’s at once playful and unsettling, depicts a panoply of horned beasts and bulging-eyed demons in saturated blue and purple skin tones, as the artist peers out at the viewer, Frida Kahlo-like, from among them.
Three pieces by Arghavan Khosravi center female images in surreal juxtapositions of Islamic symbolism and decorative patterns, contemporary objects, collage techniques and shifting perspectives.
In “The Touch,” a young woman stares out from behind a gauzy curtain while, below her, bursts of pink bubble gum and a red string link a group of sleeping men to a neoclassical bust. 
“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.”