In 1923 he exhibited for the first time at the Autumn Salon in Paris and made friends with Manuel Ángeles Ortiz who introduced him to the circle of Spanish painters of what will be called the School of Paris: Joaquín Peinado (with whom he would share a studio), Celso Lagar, Pancho Cossío and Francisco Bores. Together with them he will exhibit regularly at the Percier and Max Berger galleries.

In 1931 he joined Lulu Jourdain (daughter of the decorator, writer and politician Francis Jourdain), who became his muse and regular model. On May 13, 1936, Lulú and Hernando celebrated a great farewell dinner at the Hostal Cervantes in Madrid, attended by, among others: Luis Buñuel, the brothers Francisco and Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Neruda, María Teresa León, José Caballero and Pepín Bello.

Two months after the Spanish Civil War broke out, Viñes participated in anti-Franco activities being one of the architects of the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic.

In the fall of 1939, when his daughter was just born, they had to flee from the Paris occupied by the Germans, taking refuge in Saint Jean de Luz, next to the Franco-Spanish border. His richly colored Fauvist painting necessarily became intimate. Although in 1946 he participated in the exhibition “Art of the republican school” at the Manés Palace in Prague, between 1948 and 1963, he was forced to give guitar lessons to survive. His return to artistic life comes with the retrospective of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid in 1965. Since that year, the exhibitions have followed one another. In 1985, he underwent a lung operation in Paris. Three years later he is awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts. He dies in Paris at the age of 88.

He has work at the Center Pompidou in Paris; the Reina Sofía Art Center in Madrid; in the museums of Castres and Albí, in France; at the National Museum in Prague; in the museum of the Tel-Aviv Museum, in Israel; and in various institutions in South America and the United States.