The public work Tumbling Cubes by Bert Flugelman has long greeted visitors to Margaret Timpson Park but last month it was scrawled over with graffiti tags and red paint.

Alastair Wilson's home overlooks the park and he was distressed to see the work of a famous artist "desecrated".

Other residents said they had long been concerned about the condition of the sculptures, which had been "jumped on", bashed and neglected.

"It's had graffiti on it in the past on and off," Mr Wilson said. "There was a big spate of graffiti around [the] park just a couple of months ago, it was on just about every surface you could find including our wall."

On Tuesday, Transport Canberra and City Services said it had organised a team to "sensitively" remove the graffiti from the artwork.

A spokesman said the graffiti had been reported several times over the past fortnight, but specialist advice had to be sought to avoid damaging the sculpture.

"While minor incidents of graffiti have been removed previously, this is the first major incident of graffiti vandalism on this artwork," the spokesman said.

"Incidents of illegal graffiti have also been prevalent in the last couple of weeks in the streets of Belconnen, on hoardings around new developments, footpaths and on private property."

But, overall, the spokesman said reports of graffiti in Canberra were down thanks to regular monitoring and removal by contractors.

The ACT government has been waging a war on the $500,000 public cost of removing illegal graffiti by engaging the community in legal street art spaces and workshops.

Last year, the government appointed the territory's first graffiti co-ordinator and was now working to recruit more volunteers to its "Graffiti Busters" program.

The cost of removing graffiti from the Belconnen sculpture is still to be determined.

More of Flugelman's work is featured across Canberra and Australia, including outside the National Gallery.