✦ Golden Grolla Award 2012

Juan Tamariz

The grand maestro of card magic

For the magic community, Juan Tamariz is simply the maestro: the most influential card magician alive. Born in Madrid, he transformed Spanish card magic into a school admired all over the world, and his joyful stage character, with the invisible violin he plays after every miracle, hides one of the deepest thinkers the art has ever had. Behind every laugh there is a structure calculated to make the impossible feel absolute.

His books, from "The Magic Way" to "The Five Points in Magic" and the works on his mnemonica stack, are studied like treatises: they teach not tricks but the psychology of astonishment, the way a spectator's mind can be guided, step by step, to a moment with no explanation left. As the soul of the Escuela Mágica de Madrid he has shaped generations of Spanish masters, and virtually every card magician of the last fifty years, anywhere in the world, owes something to him.

Masters of Magic honoured Tamariz with the Golden Grolla in 2012, in Saint-Vincent, welcoming the man that magicians from every continent travel just to watch shuffle a deck.

Honoured by Masters of Magic among the legends who have shaped the history of magic.