Born in Porto in 1937, Domingos Pinho graduated in Painting from ESBAP in 1963, the school where he would become a teacher. As a student, he won the José da Costa Meireles and Rodrigo Soares, Três Artes, and Rotary Club of Porto Awards.

He began exhibiting collectively in the 1950s and individually the year he graduated. He was a founding member of Cooperativa Árvore. He was co-founder of the arts and letters magazine "Paisagem". He obtained two F.C.G. grants, one in 1966 for study visits to Europe, and another in 1978 to investigate "Realism in the Twentieth Century".

With artworks that in the 60s reached abstraction, Domingos Pinho dedicated himself to a material and gestural investigation that he would abandon in the following decade, opting for a meticulous realism that features everyday objects.

From the mid-1980s onwards and during the 1990s, brushstrokes of an almost expressionist nature began to return, inaugurating a new cycle in the painter's production.