There’s something especially thrilling about seeing new masterworks for the very first time. Anyone who received and read a copy of Phaidon’s classic contemporary overview, Cream, may well remember that feeling. In 1998, (then) little-known art-world luminaries such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and Okwui Enwezor selected the brightest new young talents of the day; the book showcased Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Sze, and Kara Walker, among many others. Follow-up titles in that series featured similarly prescient picks, featuring works by Elmgreen & Dragset, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, and Yoshitomo Nara, to name just a few.

This season, Phaidon returns to this theme with Prime: Art’s Next Generation. Once again, we appointed an esteemed panel of experts to select 107 of the best contemporary artists under the age of 40. The selection committee includes plenty of notable figures, such as Frieze’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Durbin; Victor Wang, artistic director and chief curator at M WOODS Museum in Beijing; Tate curator Fiontan Moran; Krist Gruijthuijsen, Director of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; and Bernardo Mosqueira, artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis in Rio de Janeiro and curatorial fellow, of the New Museum in New York.