Bertrand Lavier's "unruly mass" of hoses creates a fountain outside the Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Lengths of brightly coloured garden hose are arranged to resemble a classical fountain in a work by artist Bertrand Lavier currently installed in the grounds of London's Serpentine Sackler Gallery (+ slideshow).

Serpentine Galleries commissioned French artist Bertrand Lavier to create the piece, named Fountain, on a patch of grass in front of Zaha Hadid's undulating extension to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Hyde Park.

Lavier, who creates assemblages made from found and modified objects, used sections of vibrantly-coloured garden hoses with plastic nozzles to produce the sculpture.

Bound together by cables, the hosepipes are held in an upright position, with their nozzled tips arching over to mimic water trickling from the bowl of a fountain, while in the centre a solitary hose sprays a fine mist upwards into the air.

"Bertrand Lavier's Fountain is a playful interpretation of this most traditional of garden features," said gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

"Instead of classical sculpture of a figure of natural form, the jets of water emanate from an apparently unruly mass of garden hoses."

Different types of nozzle create a variation in the pressure and dispersion of the spray into a shallow pool surrounded by a low white wall to collect the falling water.

The colours of the plastic piping contrast with the bright white roof of Hadid's structure, which dips to meet the ground at one side.

"The bright colours and mass-produced forms of the hoses and nozzles appear in stark contrast with both the Neoclassical facade of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery and the smooth lines of the Magazine Restaurant, designed by Zaha Hadid," said Peyton-Jones and Obrist.

Lavier's work has roots in the Readymades of the French-American conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who once presented a graffitied urinal – also titled Fountain – for display at an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917.

Fountain is a recreation of a pair of fountains that the artist originally installed in the grounds of Versailles in 2009.

It will be on show until 4 October 2015 and is part of a series of year-long installations commissioned by the gallery.