Eddie Peake - Concrete Pitch review: All the messiness of art and life brought together

The concrete football pitch in Finsbury Park, where Eddie Peake grew up, was a space for the diverse activities of diverse people.

It acts here as a theme, but also a metaphor for the show’s breadth of work.

Stroud Green Road, another Finsbury Park reference, snakes through the space and is Peake’s best work yet.

It’s a series of stainless steel tables with troughs of hair gel, limb-like polished plaster sculptures, neons and speakers which play a traffic-like drone, triggered by DJ decks, linked by wires, like arteries.

It evokes the bodily experience of urban space: connected, yet alienated. Peake’s work explores language: words on walls that he’ll write as he performs throughout the show; the language of looping, syncing bodies in a video of a choreographed performance.

The show teems with ideas and visual spark. But there’s too much: paintings, including new works evoking psychedelic posters, clutter rather than punctuate the space; the inclusion of a booth with DJs from Kool London, the underground station that provided the soundtrack to Peake’s adolescence, is too arch.

I’d like Peake to pare his practice down, but he might see that as betraying his aim to bring the messiness of life and art together.