From 1938 to 1943, Freire studied painting and sculpture at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Universidad del Trabajo del Uruguay in Montevideo under José Cuneo Perinetti, Guillermo Laborde, and Severino Pose,[2] and then at the Consejo de Educación Técnico Profesional under Antonio Pose.
She began to explore modern artistic languages by studying African masks and precolumbian art.
She learned of the work of European painters Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart among others, which led to the consolidation of her abstract language.
Freire was also in touch with the group of abstract artists around Aldo Pellegrini in Argentina and felt great affinity with concrete and neoconcrete artists in Brazil, like Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica,[5] but her work developed its own characteristic style.
In the early 1990s she started on a series "El oro de los tigres" (The Gold of Tigers) in which dark structures were placed on yellow backgrounds.
From 1954 to 1992, Freire had 17 solo exhibitions in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, Bruselas and Washington.
[10] Freire's career was among the longest of any Uruguayan artist and she is a central reference for geometric art in the Río de la Plata region.