When an abandoned rusted bicycle had outlived its usefulness as trustworthy transportation, American-born and Berlin-based artist, Brad Downey, mounted it on an equally rusty bike rack and then transformed it into a working fountain.

With an established reputation for public space art installations using found objects, Downey gives to meaning to the term “upcycled” by repurposing the bike into a water fountain that recirculates the water from a nearby canal through the handlebars and then spouts it back into the canal.

Part of a public art project in Klagenfurt, Austria, Fountain is a land art installation created out of what might have otherwise been considered a piece of trash. Reminiscent in concept to Dada artist Marcel Duchamps’s 1917 porcelain urinal also called Fountain, Downey’s “art intervention” also questions the inherent purpose of an object by re-presenting it in an unconventional setting or manner.

Fountain was on view in Austria until August 12 but has now moved to Basel, Switzerland for Skultur II, where it joins a group of over 20 contemporary artists in the city’s Schützenmattpark in a display of “a new form of expression and an unexpected visual language” to be experienced until November 3, 2013.

Images via Gerhard Maurer / Lendhauer

Hat tip to PSFK and DesignBoom.