Kalinin participated in unofficial artists’ group shows in Naples, Italy in 1965, the Museum of Fine Arts in Lugano, Switzerland in 1970 and the Beekeeping Pavilion of the Exhibition of All-Union Economic Achievements in 1975. He became well-known among non-conformist artists, his works were sought after by collectors and were included in the seminal “The Avant-garde Betrayed” book by Franco Miele in 1973.

Viacheslav developed his unique style of cityscapes and joined the painting section of the Moscow Committee of Graphic Artists when one of his works was officially purchased by the Ministry of Culture in 1976. He went abroad to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1978 and had his first personal exhibition in Moscow in 1979. In the 1980s Kalinin travelled to Hungary, Germany, the USA, participated in many group shows and had solo exhibitions in Brandenburg, Paris, New York and Basel.

In 1991 his monograph, “Kalinin-Zamoskvorechye. A retrospective, 1962-1990”, was published and he started to work in Los Angeles under a contract with a gallery which was later extended for another three years. Viacheslav had retrospective exhibitions at the Moscow Central House of Artists and the Torrance City Arts Centre in California in 1994.

Kalinin worked hard and exhibited with commercial galleries in the USA, France, Switzerland and Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. He had his major retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery and another definitive monograph “Viacheslav Kalinin. Paintings. Works on Paper” was published in 2008. His works are held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ludwig Museum in Aachen and Municipal Museum in Bochum, Germany, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, the State Tretyakov Gallery and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, Kyiv Museum of Russian Art in Ukraine and many important provincial museums in Russia.