One way would be to plot into a new figure each time, instead of specifying to plot into figure 1 each time:
x = [-10:1E-3:10];
y = sin(x);
% figure(1)
figure() % create a new figure
plot(x, y)
grid on
box on
axes('Position',[.40 .33 .45 .24])
plot(x,y)
ylim([0, 1])
title('Closer look')
grid on
box off
