Grand-scale exhibition in Limerick

EV+A 98 has a generous eight-week run. Good news for anyone who wants to see it because, with work by 151 artists dispersed over 30 Limerick venues, if you start now you should just about take it all in by closing time at the end of November.

Mike Fitzpatrick's billboard installation is a provocative, fate-tempting advertisement for the show: "EV+A not as good as it used to be," it proclaims to the traffic backed up Bridge St. Certainly, EV+A is not what it used to be. In its 22 eventful years, its ambitions have grown out of all recognition. In terms of scale, the word megalomaniacal comes to mind, though given the disparity of resources between EV+A and practically any other major international exhibition, "foolhardy" is probably a more appropriate term.

In any event, last year EV+A took a breather and, in one of its periodic bouts of self-reflection, marshalled previous selectors and participants for a series of discussions. The curators from abroad, who have individually selected the show from year to year, proposed that someone based in Ireland should take on the task.

Limerick City Gallery curator Paul O'Reilly reluctantly shouldered the responsibility. He selected work by about 100 artists from the open submission, and invited about 50 other artists, mostly from abroad (chiefly because, he says, many Irish artists he planned to invite had submitted work). He has come up with a huge, sprawling, provocative and challenging exhibition. EV+A better than it used to be. The show's centre - or epicentre, perhaps - is usually the City Gallery in Pery Square, but this year it is out of commission, undergoing an overhaul and gaining a sizeable, limestone-clad extension.

While there is no single centre of gravity, the work is concentrated in two general areas, around Pery Square and in or close to English Town, with a stream of individual pieces sited throughout O'Connell Street serving as a conduit between. There are some potentially wonderful venues along the way - potentially, because most of them are compromised in one respect or another. They include Number 2 Pery Square, a spacious townhouse under renovation by the Limerick Civic Trust, the Bishop's Palace (another Trust building), St Mary's Cathedral, and the Shannon Rowing Club boathouse out on the river.

O'Reilly is pragmatic about the compromises involved. After all, he argues, if you are going to weave an exhibition into the very fabric of the city, you just have to accommodate the city's workaday needs. Notwithstanding the restrictions, he has arranged some particularly happy marriages between work and venue, like the video by Swiss partnership Peter Fischli and David Weiss, nestling innocently among the banks of monitors relaying numerous sports channels in the Sports Bar, waiting to snare unsuspecting fans with its conceptual shaggy dog story. Onscreen, chairs tip over, wheels roll, fluids spill, chemicals react in an endless, hypnotically fascinating chain of cause-and-effect.

In St Mary's, Karen Giusti's lacework dance of death, composed of innumerable interlocked skeletons, is ideally, dramatically placed. Or there's Paddy Jolley's film, looped on a monitor in a cramped stairwell in City Hall. It is a static view of a body (drunk? dead? unconscious?) lying in a deserted subway station at night, while empty trains shuttle through, and it makes a haunting, desolate image. At the offices of Murray O'Laoire Architects, another stairwell, another video: Paul Gray's visualisation of the neighbour from hell, in the form of a light bulb trembling under an onslaught of thumping and muffled curses from above. Back in City Hall again, Colin Darke's self-portrait wall drawing, sited by the lifts, is a striking image of frightened submission which, though it has a political genesis, would be at home in any office building.

That's true, as well, of Johnathan Horowitz's one-liner, Monday to Sunday, in the office of Michael Healy Associates. A video monitor displays the name of the day, and there's a tape for every day of the week. It gains everything from its context.

An obsessive-compulsive thread runs through a sizeable body of work, including Roisin Lewis's multi-layered, unintelligible handwriting, Bernard Smyth's disturbing two- monitor video, of a man scratching obsessively at his own naked torso, and Eliz Lagerstrom's chilling installation Pain is a State of Mind.

There are enough conventional venues, including the Dolmen Gallery, the Hunt Museum, and the Bourne Vincent Gallery at the university, to provide a conventional setting for work that demands it - like, for example, Hazel Walker's considered, atmospheric Fragment, a subtle, considered painting that makes time and space for itself. It takes a bit of effort to get out to the campus, but a fine painting show in itself of works by Richard Gorman, Sean Shanahan, Ciaran Lennon and an Italian, Marielle Simoni, makes it more than worthwhile. Ronnie Hughes's Gestalt is perhaps the best of the bunch, in a sizeable contingent of cool paintings dispersed throughout the show, including works by Luc Tuymans, Juan Usle, Stephen Brandes, Christopher Banahan, Fergus Martin, Sarah Durcan, Robert Baker, Micky Donnelly and Maureen O'Conner.

It's left to Nick Miller, with a huge, ferociously energetic portrait, and Deirdre Lyons with a small though very strong gestural abstract painting, to raise the temperature. Printmakers Grainne Buckley, Catherine Lynch, Collette Nolan and Felicity Clear all show outstanding work, as do sculptors Corban Walker, Remco de Fouw, Tom Fitzgerald, Katherine West and David Timmons. There are effective audio installations by Susan Philipz and Danny McCarthy (whose witty piece is not entirely audio). Martin Yelverton's photo-text piece, Search, which takes the form of an inconclusive narrative, was probably the best work in Confrontations earlier this year at the Gallagher Gallery, and it holds up very well. Interesting to see what he does next.

EV+A, at various venues in Limerick city, continues until November 30th.