Maximal Miniatures: A contemporary take on a centuries-old Persian art form

The Persian miniature is characterized by a critical kinship between text and image. Most profoundly, the miniature is formed by a strong history of the poetic verse, mythology, epic narrative, and lyricism, establishing the link between poetics and the visual in Iranian art history. The stories that are re-imagined in Maximal Miniatures, a curated collection on display at MEI’s gallery until May 23, 2025, refer to a variety of sources, including Ferdowsi’s 10th century epic narrative, Shahnameh (Book of Kings), Nizami Ganjavi’s epic love story Khosrow and Shirin and Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds from the 12th century, and many others. These grand tales abound with characters, scenes of action, lessons, and poetic verses that continue to inspire artists and establish a strong link between poetry and visual art. But the continued force of the miniature in contemporary art does not suggest an imitation of classical forms, nor is the visual simply an illustrative component of an authoritative text. The miniature presents a compositionally complex image in which the viewer is privy to a combination of viewing perspectives — flat yet vertical, interior and exterior, and a multiplicity of patterns and pictorial elements — which creates a dense picture plane filled with information.

Stylistically, the miniature presents an uninterrupted visual field with multiple focal points of action that draw the viewer’s eyes across the image. This image is typically framed with detailed patterns of ornamentation and elaborate architectural elements. The Maximal Miniatures exhibition is interested in the ways in which contemporary artists have built upon this maximalist impulse within the miniature and reinvented the genre with new questions in mind. The descriptor “maximal” points to the way in which each of the artists builds from the sense of space, ornamentation, perspective, and poetry within and beyond the image to expand them in scale, color, subject, symbol, and form. Bridging the historical scenes of encounter that characterize the miniature with contemporary struggles and realities, the 13 artists in Maximal Miniatures both create a transhistorical reflection on the genre while also producing works that subvert the canon in form and content, establishing a new visual language. 

Critical to the classical miniature’s pictorial representation is that it is not a realist representation per se but rather an artistic depiction of the imaginary realm. In line with this tradition, Mahsa Tehrani’s work transcends traditional narrative forms, creating a distinct, imaginative, otherworldly landscape unbounded by geographical or conceptual borders. In A Land of Magnets and Miracles (2023), Tehrani creates an unsettling and dreamlike tableau filled with both scenes of ordinary life, including friends eating watermelon and lovers strolling arm in arm, and surreal objects, like a shattered porcelain vase and animals depicted in an unnatural scale compared to other figures in the scene, giving the sense of inhabiting an intermediary or otherworldly place. Echoing this creation of a liminal realm, Soraya Sharghi’s The Loom of Fates (2024) creates an ethereal world in which a number of mythological characters encircle a central feminine figure, protecting her with a quiet intensity. These mystical beings, part human and part animal, stand at the threshold, holding their breath for an unknown event, suspended in a moment of waiting. Bahar Sabzevari’s diptych moves past the eeriness of these mythological figures and embraces them as part of herself; in Party (2019), the artist creates a surrealist self-portrait in which she is intimately bound up with the other world, both by forces that empower her and by those that come from within.

 

A sense of eeriness marks Elham Pourkhani’s Zahhak’s Castle Is Calm (2023), which mirrors the classical miniature’s intricate detail as well as the architecture of the picture plane, combining multiple space-times within a single frame. When we look closely at this work on paper, we see that each figure is not actually living but is in skeletal form, which creates an uncanny feeling. The only living being portrayed besides Zahhak in this composition is a little girl who stands surrounded by the stillness of the chaotic world. Equally unsettling is Shahpour Pouyan’s work, which appears at first glance most similar to classical miniatures in both size and material but in fact reflects on the idea of presence and absence. In both “After” Mohammed and the Angel of Snow and Fire (2017) and Khosrow and Ships Loaded With Treasures (2019), Pouyan erases the human figures, creating a symbolic void at the center of the work and leaving a floating signifier for which viewers must create their own meaning. This erasure of the figure or illumination of absence invites a subtle investigation of the role of authority and power and reopens the composition to new interpretations.

 

Where Pouyan explores the idea of the void, or a signifier without a referent, Parinaz Eleish’s Remembrance of Things Past (2020) presents a collage of newspaper scraps detailing historic moments and important figures like the Iranian poet and director Forough Farokhzad and Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, among many other images. The arched collage frames an empty dining room in a historic house in Kashan, Iran, creating an association with architecture as a carrier of history. This palimpsest of time and memory both reflects the stories carried within the ancient home while also inviting viewers to insert their own experiences. The question of history as that which is created, told, and retold is critical to many works across Maximal Miniatures. Farah Ossouli’s work begins from the vital connection between Iranian painting and epic narratives. Her work centers the theatrical quality of miniature paintings, which are characteristically filled with multiple centers of action often within the same picture plane. Ossouli’s work reimagines pivotal battle scenes while placing women as the central actors and heroines. While at first glance Ossouli’s works are quite beautiful, when approached closely they depict brutal scenes of violence, creating a tension for the viewer who must reckon with the juxtaposition of beauty and brutality. In Delacroix and I (2014), she directly invokes the French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix by placing herself in dialogue with the artist and his corpus, and also stages her work and the miniature genre within a set of global historical art references.

 

 

Farideh Lashai bridges the violent struggles described in the Shahnameh with her own witnessing of the Iran-Iraq war; in two untitled works on paper (both from 1989), which at first appear as abstract expressionist depictions of nature, the artist reflects on what it means to be a woman in a moment of historical destruction. Lashai portrays the impact of heroine Rudabeh, a significant character in the Book of Kings, not only as the mother of Rostam but as an agentive force, a protector, an actor, and a witness to history. In the diptych, there is a celestial, overflowing natural landscape; and yet amid this beauty, there is also danger and destruction reflected in the expressive features of a horse and bird flying away, and at the very center, there is an illuminated woman screaming. This woman evokes Rudabeh but also women across time, linking the historical battles of the Book of Kings to Lashai’s present and our own. Amir Fallah’s For Those Who Fear Tomorrow (2022) also explores the psychological impact of the Iran-Iraq war. While the work is ornamented with Fallah’s captivating use of color and pattern, at the center of the piece is a death’s-head hawkmoth that evokes destruction, recalling the artist’s first memory of an Iraqi air raid on Tehran. In the lower left, we see a Persian miniature of a dragon battle, representing the struggle against evil. Drawing our gaze between the central anguish and the battle scene, the viewer confronts the psychic realities of a world marked by perpetual conflict.

 

Three works by Arghavan Khosravi, The Miraj (2020), The Touch (2019), and Listen (2021), remind the viewer that the miniature is meant to be framed and viewed in a book. Like Ossouli and Lashai, Khosravi’s work also takes inspiration from the feminist force of Rudabeh and reinterprets her power in contemporary scenes of women’s struggle through colorful, playful, and surrealist depictions. Scale is very significant to this work — the female figure is much larger than the other elements in the scene, creating an imbalance that also places the woman at the center. Compositionally, the work evokes the miniature’s monoscenic quality, which draws the viewer’s gaze across the image; there are multiple windows into various worlds that allow the viewer to encounter several space-times at once. Khosravi further experiments with three-dimensional canvases, building her own shaped wooden panels, which add further depth and create optical illusions that augment the compositions. Kour Pour also builds from the miniature’s conceptual and compositional foundation. His Migration Series (2016) evokes the structure of a medieval Persian manuscript with a delineated pictorial space existing inside a greater whole. A stream of American and European immigrants crosses the surface and borders of the canvas, which is framed within an intricately patterned architectural margin. The surface of the painting and imagery of migrants is built up with layers of etching, silkscreen printing, and hand-painting, and then removed using an electric sander. This process infuses the work with a sense of loss, history, and memory, where certain figures are difficult to decipher, if not impossible to recover.

 

Blending multiple techniques, from 19th century reverse glass painting to the idea of copy and internet-era art, Iman Raad’s work brings miniature painting into a broader set of techniques and media. In a Mirror (2020) draws the viewer into a psychedelic orbit in which a bird looking into its own reflection is multiplied, blurring a sense of mechanical reproducibility and ecstatic experience. The act of repetition is critical to Reza Derakshani’s practice, which we see in Sunset Royal Hunt (2021) from his Hunting Series, which refers to ancient Persian manuscript painting depicting hunting scenes in the Royal Court of the Iranian Shah. In what has become his signature technique, Derakshani abstracts these figures by creating layers and textured surfaces in his canvases. While the hunting figures are present across the canvas, the act of layering paint, roof tar, sand, and enamel creates a sense of deep time and poetic reflection. The figure of the hunter is repeated throughout the piece, drawing our gaze to various points in the canvas, just like a classical miniature painting has multiple centers of energy and action.

 

 

Each of these works challenges the viewer to look in a new way — the way one might read poetry — which is to say, to enter the architecture of the work slowly, to be aware of the various corners and crevices that can recount another story, to linger, to consider the resonances between the past and the present, to approach the image from multiple perspectives, to return to it over and over again, and to continue to imagine in novel ways.

 

Donna Honarpisheh is Associate Curator of Knight Art and Research at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami.

Main photo credit: Jason Dixson Photography