María Freire was one of the earliest painters in South America to refer to her work as abstract. She integrated symbology from both European – such as Cubism – and African Art into her visual vocabulary. Freire trained at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Montevideo from 1938 to 1943. Her first sculptures indicate the profound influence of African art on her work, something of an anomaly for an artist in South America at that time. In 1953, she visited the São Paulo Art Biennial, where she came into contact with other contemporary artists of the time (like Joaquín Torres-García), and learned of the work of European painters such as Piet Mondrian. She went on to develop her individualistic work within a strict, yet variable formal vocabulary, often switching between periods of greater or lesser degrees of abstraction, before landing on her characteristic style. Working in series, she used polygons and bands of color in a reductive palette, taking colors, rhythms and forms as their own subjects.